All My Sins Remembered

All My Sins Remembered Rosie Thomas From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl. Available on ebook for the first time.Jake, Clio and Julius Hirsh and their cousin Lady Grace Stretton formed a charmed circle in those lost innocent days before the Great War – united against the world.Old now, Clio recounts their story for her biographer: Jake's wartime experiences, which moved him to work as a doctor in the London slums; Clio and Grace, flappers flitting through bohemian Fitzrovia to emerge as literary lion and pioneering Member of Parliament respectively; the music that drowned for Julius the crash of jackboots in thirties Berlin.But for herself, Clio remembers a different story. Desperate lies and bitter secrets, hopeless love and careless betrayal, jealous loyalties more like fetters. And above all, the truth about Grace, beautiful, destructive siren at the centre of the circle. All My Sins Remembered BY ROSIE THOMAS Contents Title Page (#u6c521e6f-dcdd-5f7b-92a5-88a271c335c4) One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen Eighteen Nineteen Twenty Twenty-one Twenty-two Twenty-three Twenty-four Keep Reading About the Author Also by Rosie Thomas Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher London, 1990 It was a lie, but it was not a lie that could do any damage. The writer reflected on the relative harmlessness of what she was doing as she waited on the step for the doorbell to be answered. It was a cold and windy autumn afternoon, and the trees that bordered the canal in Little Venice were shedding their leaves into the water. She had turned away to look at the play of light in the ripples drawn behind a barge when the door opened at last behind her. There was a smiling nurse in a blue dress. ‘Mrs Ainger, hello there. Come in, now.’ ‘How is she today?’ Elizabeth Ainger asked. ‘Not so bad at all. Quite clear in the head, as a matter of fact. She even asked when you were coming.’ ‘She’s getting used to me,’ the biographer said. ‘I’m glad it’s one of her good days.’ The nurse showed her into a drawing room at the rear of the house with a view of a small garden through double doors. There were porcelain ornaments arranged on the marble mantelpiece, a little blue painting of an interior hanging above them, embroidered cushions and faded rose-patterned loose covers. These neat, traditional furnishings were faintly at odds with the picture that hung on the wall behind the old lady’s chair. It was a double portrait, in oils, of two young women. They were looking away from each other, out of the frame of the picture, and there was tension in every line of their bodies. The painter’s peculiarly hectic style owed something to Picasso, and something to Stanley Spencer. It was so quiet in the room, away from the noise of the traffic, that the occupant might have been sitting in some cottage in the country instead of in the middle of London. ‘Hello, Aunt Clio,’ Elizabeth said. The nurse withdrew, and closed the door behind her. The tiny old woman in the velvet-upholstered chair was not really Elizabeth’s aunt, but her grandmother’s first cousin. But it was to ‘Aunt Clio’s’ house in Oxford that Elizabeth had been taken on visits with her mother when she was a little girl. She could just remember the rooms, with their forbidding shelves of dark books, and her childish impression that Aunt Clio was important, but in some way not easy. When Elizabeth was seven, her American father had taken his wife and daughter back to live in Oregon, and there had only been birthday cards and Christmas presents from Oxford after that. By the time Elizabeth was grown up herself, and had come back to live in the country of her birth, the links had been all but broken. Until this series of visits had begun, the two women had not met for thirty years. Clio turned her head a fraction to look at her visitor. ‘It’s you, is it?’ Elizabeth smiled and shrugged, deprecatingly held out her tape-recorder. ‘I am afraid so. Do you feel too tired to talk today?’ ‘I am not in the least tired.’ She did not look it, either. Her body was tiny and frail, but her eyes were bright and sharp like fish caught in their nets of wrinkles. She watched Elizabeth Ainger sitting down, adopting a familiar position in the chair opposite to her own, and fiddling with her little tape-recorder. ‘I just wonder why you are not bored to death with all these old tales?’ With a show of cheerful patience the younger woman answered, ‘You can’t tell me anything that will bore me. I am your biographer, remember?’ That was the lie, but it came out fluently enough. The biography was not of her relative, Clio Hirsh, although she would not have been an inappropriate subject, but of Clio’s first cousin. Lady Grace Brock, n?e Stretton, was Elizabeth’s maternal grand-mother. She was the daughter of an Earl, a famous socialite in her day and then one of the first women Members of Parliament. Elizabeth had never met her, but she was fascinated by her. And her enthusiasm had communicated itself to her publisher when they had met to discuss over lunch what Elizabeth’s next project might be as a middle-range, moderately successful author of popular biographies. ‘Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard did well enough,’ the published mused. ‘Although your grandmother is not quite so well known, of course. Why don’t you put some material together for us to have a look at?’ Elizabeth’s mother and the rest of the family had warned her at the outset that Clio was famously reluctant to talk about her cousin and friend. The defences that the old lady duly put up against Elizabeth’s first casual enquiries were infuriating, and impregnable, but she needed her co-operation, and so Elizabeth had pretended that it was a family biography that she was researching, with particular emphasis on Clio’s own life. Elizabeth was invited to call at the house in Little Venice. The first visit had led to a series of interviews, and Elizabeth had patiently waited and listened. It would not matter if the finished book was not what had been promised. Books took a long time to write, and Clio was very old and no longer reliably clear in her own mind. Clio said irritably, ‘I bore myself. Who could possibly want to read anything about me? I wish I hadn’t agreed to this rigmarole.’ ‘But you did agree.’ ‘I know that. And having agreed to it, I am doing it.’ She was tart, as she often was on her lucid days. Elizabeth knew that Clio did not care for her, but she took the trouble to conceal her own reciprocal irritation. ‘We were talking about Blanche and Eleanor, last time I was here,’ Elizabeth prompted. ‘You know it all. You’ve seen all their letters, the papers. What more do you want to hear?’ ‘Just what you remember. Only that.’ The old woman sighed. She was almost ninety. She remembered so many things but she had forgotten more. The firm connective tissue of memory that once held the flesh of her life together had all but dissolved. There were only incidents to recall now, isolated like the tips of submerged rocks rearing out of a wide sea. Then, in a stronger voice, Clio suddenly said, ‘I remember my Aunt Blanche’s scent. White lilac, and burnt hair. They frizzed their hair, you know, in those days. With curling tongs that the maid heated red-hot in the fire. I remember the smell of burning hair.’ Elizabeth pressed the record button, and then sat quietly, listening as Clio talked. This was the pattern of her visits. One (#u2bf208d7-2a0d-5ee2-b00e-16756161e98b) The old woman sat propped in her nest of cushions and rugs. Her hands rested like small ivory carvings on the rubbed velvet arms of the chair. The visitor waited, watching her to see if she would doze, or sit in silence, or if today would be a talking day. Clio said to Elizabeth, not looking at her but away somewhere else, a long way off, ‘I remember the holidays. There were always wonderful holidays.’ She tilted her head, listening to something that reminded her. When she thought about it, she supposed that had been Nathaniel’s doing. Nathaniel applied the same principles to holidays as to his work. He could turn the radiance of his enthusiasm equally on the business of enjoyment or the pleasures of academic discipline. And Nathaniel’s enthusiasm infected them all, all of his children. When the time came for the family migrations, excitement would fill the red-brick house with high-pitched twittering, like real birds. Clio could hear the starlings out in the garden now. It must be their chorus that had taken her back. The nurse would have tipped the crusts of the breakfast toast on the bird-table. ‘Where did you go?’ Cressida’s daughter Elizabeth asked. ‘Different places.’ Clio glanced at her, suddenly sly. ‘Grace and the others used to come with us, too.’ It amused her to see how the mention of Grace sharpened the other’s attention. It always did. There had been different holidays, but almost always beside the sea. They would take a house, or two houses, if one was not big enough for Hirshes and Strettons together, with their retinue of nursemaids and attendants. The children and their mothers would stay there all the long summer, and the two fathers would visit when they could. Only they almost never came at the same time. Nathaniel would go away for some of those summer vacations on reading parties with his undergraduates, or on visits to Paris and Berlin. And John Leominster had the estate at Stretton to attend to, and business in London, and the affairs of his club. It was Blanche and Eleanor who were always there. Clio and Grace and the boys ran over the expanses of rawly glittering sand, or hung over the rock pools, or dragged their shrimping nets through fringes of seaweed before lifting them in arcs of diamond spray to examine the catch. It was the mothers they always ran back to, to show off the mollusc or sidling crab, Jake pounding ahead with Julius at his heels, and shoulder to shoulder, the two girls, with their skirts gathered up in one hand and their sharp elbows sticking out. If one of them could manage a dig at the other, to make her swerve or miss her footing, then so much the better. It would mean reaching the boys first, having the chance to blurt out with them the news of the tiny discovery, while the loser came sulkily behind, forced to pretend that nothing mattered less. The two nannies sat with the nursemaid in a sheltered corner at the top of the beach. The little brothers and sisters, Hirshes and Strettons, played at their feet or slept in their perambulators. These babies were beneath the attention of the bigger children. The flying feet swept past, sending up small plumes of silvery sand, heading for the mothers. Blanche and Eleanor sat a little distance apart, beneath a complicated canvas awning. They were protected from the sun and the sea breeze by panels of canvas that unrolled from the roof-edge. The little pavilion was carried down to the beach every morning and erected by Blanche’s chauffeur, who also brought down their canvas chairs and spread out the rugs on which they rested their feet. One year Hugo Stretton had made a red knight’s pennant to fly from the top of the supporting pole. This spot of scarlet was the focus of the beach, however far the children wandered. The twin sisters sat beneath it in the canvas shade, watching their families and mildly gossiping. Sometimes there was a husband nearby, either Nathaniel Hirsh, with his black beard bristling over a book, or John Leominster, bowling at Hugo who stood in front of a makeshift wicket and squinted fiercely at the spinning ball. But if neither husband was there, Blanche and Eleanor were equally content. They found one another’s company perfectly satisfactory, as they had always done. It was always Jake who reached them first. ‘Look at this, Mama, Aunt Blanche. Look what we found.’ Then Julius would plunge down into the sand beside him. ‘I found it. It came up in my net.’ And one of the girls would drop between the two of them, panting for breath and grinning in her triumph. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Can we keep it for a pet? I’ll look after it, I promise I will.’ The second girl would stumble up, red-faced and pouting. ‘Don’t be silly, you can’t keep things like that for pets. They aren’t domestic,’ Clio would say scornfully, because it was the only option left open to her. It was usually Clio. Grace was quicker and more determined in getting what she wanted. She usually won the races. It isn’t fair, Clio had thought, almost from the time she had been able to think. Jake is my brother and Julius is my twin. They’re both mine, Grace is only an outsider. But Grace never behaved like an outsider, and never behaved as if she owed her Hirsh cousins any thanks for her inclusion in their magic circle. She took it loftily, as her right. The children knelt in a ring, at their mothers’ feet. Jake put his hand into the net and lifted out their catch to show it off. Blanche and Eleanor bent their identical calm faces and padded coiffures over him, ready to admire. One of them gave a faint cry. ‘It is quite a big one. Don’t let it nip you, Jacob, will you?’ Hugo was digging in the sand nearby. His curiosity at last overcame him and he left his complicated layout of moats and battlements and strolled over to them, his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers. ‘It’s only a stupid crab,’ he observed. ‘Stupid yourself,’ Clio and Grace rounded on him, united in defence. ‘Just because you didn’t catch it.’ ‘I wouldn’t have bothered. It’ll die in five minutes, in this sun.’ Hugo turned his back on them, returning to his solitary game. Hugo was Grace’s elder brother. He was good as an extra player in field games, or for Racing Demon, or to perform the less coveted roles in the rambling plays that Clio and Julius wrote, but he never belonged to the circle. There was room for only the four of them within it. Hugo would have said, ‘I’m not interested in stupid clubs. They’re for little girls.’ Knowing better, none of them would have bothered to contradict him. Eleanor or Blanche would say, soothingly, ‘It is very handsome. Look at those claws. But I think Hugo may be right, you know. It will be happier under a rock, somewhere near the water. Shall I walk over there with you, so we can make sure it finds a safe home?’ Then, whichever mother it happened to be would stand up, smoothing the folds of her narrow bell skirt and the tucked and pearl-buttoned front of her white blouse. If it was a hot day she would shake out the folds of her little parasol and tilt it over her dark head, before following them across the shimmering sand. The hem of her skirt trailed on it, giving a rhythmic, languid whisper. The mothers’ feet were always invisible, even beside the sea. Even though she knew Blanche really wore elegant narrow shoes in suede or glac? kid, Grace used to imagine that her mother’s gliding step was the result of wheels, smoothly revolving beneath her rustling gowns. When they came to the rocks the children hunched together, watching as Jake slowly opened his hands and laid the crab in the narrow slice of shade. The creature seemed to rise on its toes, like a ballerina on points, before it darted sideways. They watched until the crimped edge of the green and black shell disappeared under the ledge. Julius flattened himself on his stomach and peered after it, but he couldn’t see the stalky eyes looking out at him. ‘It’s gone,’ they said sadly. The mother or aunt reassured them. ‘It will be happier, you know. A crab isn’t like the dogs, or Grace’s rabbits.’ And, seeing their miserable faces, she would laugh her pretty silvery laugh, and tell them to run over to Nanny and ask if they might walk to the wooden kiosk at the end of the beach road for lemonade. When was that? Clio asked herself. Which summer, of all those summers? Grace and Julius and I must have been nine, and Jake eleven. Nineteen ten. And where? It might have been Cromer, or Hunstanton. Not France, that was certain, although there had been two summers on the wide beaches of the Normandy coast. That had been Nathaniel’s doing, too. He had made the plans, and chosen the solid hotels with faded sun awnings and ancient, slow-footed waiters. He had supervised the exodus of the families, marshalling porters to convey brass-bound trunks, seemingly dozens of them, and booming instructions in rapid French to douaniers and drivers. It had all seemed very exotic. Clio was proud of her big, red-mouthed, polyglot father. Uncle John Leominster seemed a dry stick beside him, and Clio glanced sidelong at Grace to make sure that she too was registering the contrast. But if Grace noticed anything, she gave no sign of it. She would look airily around her, interested but not impressed. Her own father was the Earl of Leominster, milord anglais, and she herself was Lady Grace Stretton. That was superiority enough. Clio writhed under the injustice of it, her pride in Nathaniel momentarily forgotten. That was how it was. Eleanor and Blanche enjoyed Trouville. They liked the early evening promenade when French families walked out in chattering groups, airing their fashionable clothes. The Hirshes and Strettons joined the pageant, the sisters shrewdly appraising the latest styles. The Countess of Leominster might buy her gowns in Paris but Eleanor, a don’s wife, couldn’t hope to. She would take the news back to her dressmaker in Oxford. The two of them drew glances wherever they went. They were an arresting sight, gliding together in their pongee or tussore silks, their identical faces framed by huge hats festooned with drooping masses of flowers or feathers. Their children walked more stiffly, constrained by their holiday best, under the benign eye of whichever husband happened to be present. Grace liked to walk with Jake, which left Julius and Clio together. Clio was happy enough with that, but she would have preferred it if Jake could have been at her other side. They were all happy, except for Uncle John, who did not care for Abroad. Blanche never wanted to oppose him, and so the experiment was only repeated once. After that, they returned to Norfolk. Nineteen eleven was the year of the boat. The summer holiday began the same way as all the others. The Hirshes and their nanny and two maids travelled from Oxford to London by train, and stayed the night in the Strettons’ town house in Belgrave Square. It was an exciting reunion for the cousins, who had not seen each other since the Easter holiday at Stretton. Clio and Grace hugged each other, and then Grace kissed Jake and Julius in turn, shy kisses with her eyes hidden by her eyelashes, making the boys blush a little. Hugo watched from a safe distance. He was already at Eton, and considered himself grown up. The other four sat on the beds in the night nursery, locking their circle tight again after the long separation. The next day, the two families set off by train from Liverpool Street station. There were three reserved compartments. The parents travelled in one, the children and nannies in another, and the maids in the third. The nannies pinned big white sheets over the seats, so the childrens’ hair and clothes didn’t touch them. ‘You never know who else has been sitting there before you, Miss Clio,’ Nanny Cooper said, compressing her lips. They ate their lunch out of a big wicker picnic basket, and afterwards the smaller children fell asleep. Tabitha Hirsh, the youngest, was still a tiny baby. At the station at the other end, the Leominster chauffeur was waiting to meet them. He had driven up from London with part of the luggage. That year, there was one big house overlooking the sea. It was a maze of rooms opening out of each other, with a glassed-in sun room to one side that smelt of dried seaweed and rubber overshoes. The children ran through the rooms, shouting their discoveries to each other while the maids and nannies unpacked. Later, in the early evening, there was the first scramble down on to the beach. The clean air was full of salt and the cries of gulls. Nathaniel put on his panama hat and went with the children, letting them run ahead to the water’s edge and not calling them back to walk properly as the nannies would have done. From the high-water mark, where the girls hesitated in fear of wetting their white shoes, they looked back and saw Nathaniel talking to a fisherman. ‘What’s he doing?’ Julius called. ‘Can we go fishing?’ When he rejoined them, Nathaniel was beaming. ‘Surprise,’ he announced, waving his big hands. The children surged around him. ‘What is it? What?’ ‘Look and see.’ They followed him across the sand. There was an outcrop of rock draped with pungent bladder wrack, and an iron ring was let into the rock. A rusty stain bled beneath it. A length of rope was hitched through the ring, and the other end of it was secured to a small blue dinghy beached on the sand. A herring gull perched briefly on the boat’s prow, and then lifted away again. Grace stooped to read the faded lettering. ‘It’s called the Mabel.’ ‘Your Mabel, for the summer,’ Nathaniel told her. ‘Ours? Our own?’ ‘I’ll teach you to row.’ Hugo was already fumbling with the rope. ‘I can row.’ Nathaniel and the fisherman eased the dinghy down to the water’s edge, steadying it when the keel lifted free and bobbed on the ripples. ‘Six of us. You’ll have to sit still. Hugo in the front there, Jake and Julius in the middle. Leave room for the oarsmen. The girls at the stern.’ He ordered them fluently, and they scrambled to his directions, even Hugo. The fisherman in his tall rubber waders lifted Clio and swung her over the little gulf of water. ‘There, miss. Now your sister’s turn.’ He went back for Grace, and hoisted her too. ‘She’s my cousin, not my sister,’ Clio told him quickly. ‘Is that so? She’s like enough to be your twin.’ ‘He’s my real twin,’ Clio pointed at Julius. ‘But he’s nothing like so pretty,’ the man twinkled at her. Clio was sufficiently disarmed by the compliment to forget the mistake. Nathaniel dipped the oars, and the Mabel slid forward over the lazy swell. There had been boat rides before, but none had seemed as magical as the first trip in their own Mabel. They bobbed out over the green water, into the realm of the gulls. Only a few yards separated them from the prosaic shore, but they felt part of another world. They could look back at the old one, at the holiday house diminished by blue distance and at the white speck of a nanny’s apron passing in front of it. Out here there were the cork markers of lobster pots, a painted buoy with another gull perching on it, and the depths of the mysterious water. Grace leant to one side so that her fingers dipped into the waves. She sighed with pleasure. It was the first day of the holidays. There were six whole weeks to enjoy before she would be returned to Miss Alcott and the tedium of the schoolroom at Stretton. Jake and Julius were here. She was happy. Nathaniel bent over the oars. The dinghy skimmed along, and the sea breeze blew the railway fumes out of their heads. Jake said, ‘I can see Aunt Blanche. I think she’s waving.’ Nathaniel laughed. He had a big, noisy laugh. ‘I’m sure she’s waving. It’s our signal to make for dry land.’ He paddled vigorously with one oar and the boat swung in a circle. When it was broadside to the sea a wave larger than the others slapped against the side and sprayed over them. The girls shrieked with delight and shook out the skirts of their white dresses. ‘Rules of the sea,’ Nathaniel boomed, as the Mabel rose on the crest of the next wave and swept towards the beach. The rules were that no child was allowed to take out the dinghy without an adult watching. The girls were not allowed to row unless one of the fathers came in the boat. The boys would be permitted to row themselves, once they had passed a swimming test that would be set by Nathaniel. The boys often bathed in the summer holidays, wearing long navy-blue woollen bathing suits that buttoned on the shoulders. To their disappointment the girls were not allowed to do the same, because Blanche and Eleanor had never done so and didn’t consider it desirable for their daughters. They had to content themselves with removing their shoes and long stockings and paddling in the shallows. ‘Are the rules understood?’ Nathaniel demanded ferociously. ‘We understand,’ they answered in unison. The keel of the dinghy ran into the sand like a spoon digging into sugar. The fisherman had gone home. The boys jumped ashore, Nathaniel lifted Clio and Grace launched herself into Jake’s arms. He staggered a little with the weight of her, and a wave ran up and licked over his shoes. They all laughed, even Clio. As they trudged back up to the house Grace said to Clio, ‘I must say, I think your father can be splendid sometimes.’ ‘So do I,’ Clio answered with pride. The days of the holiday slipped by, as they always did. John Leominster was in Scotland for the shooting. Nathaniel went away to London, then came back again. Blanche and Eleanor stayed put, happy to be together, as they had been since babyhood. They wrote their letters side by side in the morning room, walked together in the afternoons, took tea with their children when they came in from the beach and listened to the news of the day, and after they had changed in the evenings they ate dinner alone together in the candlelit dining room, the food served to them by the manservant who came from Stretton for the holiday. The children, from elsewhere in the house, could often hear the sound of their laughter. Clio and Grace listened, their admiration touched with resentment at their own exclusion. They knew that the two of them could never be so tranquil alone together, without Jake, without Julius. For the children there were races on the beach, picnics and drives and hunts for cowrie shells, and, that year, rowing in the Mabel. The boys passed their swimming tests, and became confident oarsmen. They learnt to dive from the dinghy, shouting to each other as they balanced precariously and then launched themselves, setting the little boat wildly rocking. The girls could only watch enviously from the waterline, listening to the splashes and spluttering. ‘I could swim if they would just let me try,’ Grace muttered. ‘And so could I, easily,’ Clio affirmed. ‘Why isn’t Pappy here, so that we could at least go in the boat with them?’ They weren’t looking at each other when Grace said, ‘We should go anyway. Prove we can, and then they’ll have no reason to stop us any more, will they?’ ‘I don’t think we should. Not without asking.’ Grace laughed scornfully. ‘If we ask, we’ll be told no. Don’t you know anything about older people? Anyway, Jake won’t let anything happen.’ It was always Jake they looked to. Not Hugo, even though Hugo was the eldest. ‘I’m going to go,’ Grace announced. ‘You needn’t, if you’re scared.’ ‘I never said I was scared.’ They did look at each other then. The fisherman had been right, they were alike as sisters. Not identical like their mothers, the resemblance was not as close as that, but they had the same straight noses and blue-grey eyes, and the same thick, dark hair springing back from high foreheads. When they looked they seemed to see themselves in mirror fashion, and neither of them had ever quite trusted the reflection. Grace turned away first. She lifted her arm, and waved it in a wide arc over her head. The white sleeve of her middy-blouse fluttered like a truce signal. ‘Jake,’ she called. ‘Ja-ake, Julius, come here, won’t you?’ Jake’s black head, glistening wet like a seal’s, appeared alongside the dinghy. He rested his arms on the stern, hoisting the upper half of his body out of the water. He was almost thirteen. His shoulders were beginning to broaden noticeably under the blue woollen bathing suit. ‘What?’ Hugo and Julius bobbed up alongside him. Hugo’s head looked very blond and square alongside his cousins’. Grace’s arm signal changed to a beckoning curl. ‘Come in to shore for a minute.’ Jake began lazily kicking. Julius and then Hugo dived and swam. Under Jake’s propulsion the Mabel drifted towards the beach. Clio thought, They always do what she wants. She turned to look up the sand. The two nannies were sitting as usual on a blanket on the lee of the sea-wall. Tabitha’s perambulator stood close by. The two younger Strettons, Thomas and Phoebe, were playing in the sand. They were turning sandcastles out of seawater-rusted tin buckets. Hills the chauffeur had put up the canvas awning ready for the mothers, but they had not come down yet. They would still be attending to their volumes of correspondence. Their empty steamer chairs sat side by side, and Hugo’s red pennant flew bravely above them in the stiffening breeze. Clio saw the fisherman a little further up the beach. He was busy with his coils of nets. When she looked behind her again it was to see the boys plunging through the shallows in sparkling jets of spray. Mabel rocked enticingly at the end of her painter. ‘It isn’t fair,’ she heard Grace saying. ‘You have all the fun in the boat. I think you should take me out now.’ ‘Us,’ Clio insisted, and Grace looked at her but said nothing. She stood characteristically with her hands on her hips, her chin pushed out. Hugo laughed and Julius began to recite Nathaniel’s rules of the sea. Jake stood and looked at Grace, smiling a little. Grace fixed on him. ‘There are grown-up people on the beach, the nannies and the fisherman. You three have been rowing and swimming all week. What difference will there be just in having us in the boat? And once we’ve been, they won’t be able to stop us going again, will they? The rules are petty and unfair.’ ‘That’s true, at least.’ Support came from Hugo, who was never anxious to accept Nathaniel’s jurisdiction. ‘But we were told,’ Julius began. ‘Stay here with Clio, then.’ The twins shook their heads, and Grace smiled once more at Jake. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun for all of us to go out together, on our own?’ He put out his hand and took hers, making a little bow. ‘Will you step this way, my lady?’ Grace bobbed a curtsey, and hopped into the dinghy as Hugo held it. Her white cotton ankles twinkled under her skirts. Clio followed her, as quickly as she could. Julius sat in the prow and Hugo and Jake took an oar each. The rowlocks creaked and the Mabel turned out to sea. The nannies were still watching the babies. It was exhilarating out beyond the breakers. The swell ran under the ribs of the dinghy, seeming to Clio like the undulations of breath in the flank of some vast animal. The waves looked bigger out here than they had done from the shore, but Hugo and Jake pulled confidently together and the boat rode over the wave-breaths like a cork. On the beach Nanny Brodribb suddenly stood up and ran forward, with her white apron moulded against her by the wind. She was calling, but none of the children heard her or looked round. Grace let her head fall back. Her even teeth showed in a smile of elation. The satisfaction of getting her own way together with the sharp pleasure of the boat ride and Jake bending in front of her made her eyes bright and her cheeks rosy. ‘You see?’ she murmured. The question was for Clio, wedged beside her in the stern. ‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ They rowed on, turning in an arc away from the horizon, and once again a wave caught them broadside and washed in over them. This time, instead of laughing, Clio gave a small yelp of alarm. The water seeped in her lap, wetting her legs and thighs. It was surprisingly cold. ‘Don’t worry,’ Jake told her. ‘Don’t worry,’ Grace sang. She was filled with happiness, the sense of her own strength, after being confined on the beach with the women and the babies. She saw the blue sky riffled with thin clouds and wanted to reach it. It was joy and not bravado that made her scramble up to stand on the seat with her arms spread out. Look at me. They did look, all of them, turning their faces up slowly, as if frozen. All except for Clio, whose eyes were fixed on Grace’s feet planted on the rocking seat beside her wet skirts. She saw the button fastenings, and the rim of wet sand clinging to the leather. A second later the dinghy pitched violently. There was a wordless cry and the shoes flew upwards. Jake shouted hoarsely, ‘Grace.’ Clio looked then. She heard the cry cut off and the terrible splash. She wrenched her head and saw the eruption of bubbles at the stern of the Mabel. Grace was gone, swallowed up by the sea. The boat was already drifting away from the swirling bubbles. It pitched again, almost capsizing as Jake and then Hugo launched themselves into the water. The boat began to spin helplessly. The sun seemed to have gone in, the brilliant morning to have turned dark. ‘Take an oar. Steady her,’ Julius screamed. Clio was still staring into the water. In that instant she saw Grace, rising through it. Her face under the greenish skin of the sea was a pale oval, her eyes and mouth black holes of utter terror. ‘Row,’ Julius was shouting at her. ‘I don’t know how to,’ Clio was sobbing. She stumbled forward, took up the wooden oar, warm from Jake’s hands, and pulled on it. Grace’s head had broken the surface. She was thrashing with her arms, but no sound came out of her mouth. Then she was sinking again, and Hugo and Jake ploughed on through the swell to try to reach her. ‘Pull with me,’ Julius instructed. Clio tried to harness her gasping fear into obeying him. She stared at his white knuckles on the other oar, dipped her own and drew it into her chest. Out, and then in again. When she looked once more, Jake and Hugo had Grace’s body between them. She was lashing out at them with the last of her strength, her staring eyes sightless, and for a long moment it seemed that all three of them would be submerged. A wave poured over them, filling Grace’s open mouth. Jake flung back his head, kicking towards the Mabel and trying to haul her dead weight with him. She hung motionless now with her head under the water. Julius rowed, and Clio battled to keep time with him. Her teeth chattered with cold and terror and she repeated over and over in her head, Help us, God. Help us, God. The gap narrowed between the boat and the heavy mass in the water. Hugo had his arm under Grace’s shoulders. ‘Come on,’ Julius muttered. On the beach the two nannies had run to the water’s edge. Their thin cries sounded like the seagulls. Julius saw too that the fisherman had shoved out in his much bigger boat, the one he used to row around the lobster pots. The high red-painted prow surged through the breakers. Hugo and Julius were closer. Grace was between them, a tangled mass of hair and clothes and blanched skin. ‘Ship your oar,’ Julius ordered Clio. He leaned over the side, tilting the boat dangerously again, stretching out his arms. His hand closed in Grace’s hair. He hauled at her, feeling the terrible weight, and another wave flung the dinghy upwards so that his oar rammed up into his armpit. Hugo was choking and flailing now, and Jake’s lips were drawn back from his teeth as he gasped for breath. ‘Hold her,’ he begged Julius. In spite of the pain Julius knotted his fingers in the sodden hair, and felt the body rise as Jake put his last effort into propelling Grace towards him. Between them, they forced one dripping arm and then the other over the dinghy’s side. Julius took another handful of the back of her dress and her head rolled, pressing her streaming cheek against the blue ribs of the Mabel. Jake and Hugo could do no more than cling on to the same side. Clio leant out the other way as far as she dared. She was dazed to realize how far out to sea they had been carried. The beach and the headland and the houses seemed to belong to another world, a safe and warm and infinitely inviting place that she had never taken notice of until now, when it had gone beyond her reach. The words started up in her head again, Please God, help us. The red prow of the fisherman’s boat reared over Jake, Hugo and Grace. The man lifted one oar and paddled with the other, manoeuvring the heavy craft as if it was an eggshell. He leant over the side and Clio saw his dirty hands and his thick, brown forearms. He seized Grace and with one movement lifted her up and over the side of his boat, her legs twisting and bumping. The fisherman laid her gently in the bottom of his boat. The sight of the inanimate body was shocking and pitiful. Clio knew that Grace was dead. She forced her hand against her mouth, suppressing a cry. With the same ease, the fisherman hauled Hugo and Jake in after Grace. They sank down, staring, huddled together and trembling. Their hair was plastered over their faces, fair and dark, and seawater and spittle trailed out of their blue mouths. The man leant across and lifted the trailing bow-rope of the Mabel. He made it fast to the stern of his own boat and then lifted his oars again. The two boats rose on the crest of a wave and plunged towards the beach. A little knot of people had gathered, watching and waiting. As soon as the red boat came within wading distance, two men splashed out and hoisted the bundle of Grace between them. They ran back and grimly spread her on the sand, rolling her on to her belly, lifting her arms above her head. Clio let herself be lifted in her turn, and then she was set gently on her feet. She wanted to run away up the beach, away from the sea that gnawed at her heels, but there was no power in her legs. She almost fell, but someone’s hands caught at her. Part of the murmuring crowd closed around her, and then she heard the very sound of the warm world, the lovely safe world. It was the faint crackle of starch. She lifted her head and saw Nanny’s apron, and half fell against it. The scent of laundry rooms and flatirons and safety overwhelmed her, and she looked up and saw Nanny Cooper’s face. Her cheeks were wet and her eyes were bulging with fear. The boys had been hurried ashore. Jake and Hugo were shrouded in rugs and all of them became part of a circle that had Grace at its centre. The desperate business of the men with their huge hands, who bent over her and pounded at her narrow chest, seemed in futile contrast with her stillness. Nanny Brodribb stood beyond them, her hands pressed against her face, her mouth moving soundlessly. They waited a long time, only a few seconds. Then Grace’s mouth opened. A flood of watery vomit gushed out of her. She choked, and drew in a sip of air. They saw her ribs shudder under the soaked dress. The crowd gave a collective sigh, like a blessing. They closed in on what had become Grace again, living and breathing. Julius stumbled forward and tried to kneel beside her. ‘Give her room, can’t you?’ one of the men said roughly. They turned Grace so that she lay on her back, and her eyes opened to stare at the sky. Clio became aware of more movement beyond the intent circle. Blanche was coming, with Eleanor and Hills the chauffeur just behind her. The strangeness of it made her lift her eyes from Grace’s heaving ribs. There was no elegant glide now. Blanche’s head was jerking, she was hatless and her ribbons and laces flew around her. Clio had never seen her mother and her aunt running. It made them seem different people, strangers. The two women reached the edge of the crowd and it opened to admit them to where Grace lay. Blanche dropped on her knees, giving a low moan, but no one spoke. They were listening to the faint gasps of Grace’s breathing, all of them, willing the next to follow the last. Jake and Hugo stood shivering under their wrappings of blankets. Nanny Cooper moved to try to warm them, with Clio still clinging to her apron. The other nanny began to trudge up the slope of the beach to where the small children had been left under the nursemaid’s eye. Clio took her eyes off Grace once more, to watch her bowed back receding. They were all helpless, most noticeably the mothers themselves, kneeling with the wet sand and salt water soiling their morning dresses. They looked to the fishermen for what had to be done. Grace’s stare became less fixed. Her eyes slowly moved, to her mother’s face. She was breathing steadily now, with no throat-clenching pauses between the draughts of air. The fisherman lifted her shoulders off the sand, supporting her in his arms. Another of the men came forward with a pewter flask. He put it to her mouth and tilted a dribble of brandy between her teeth. Grace shuddered and coughed as the spirit went down. ‘She’ll do,’ one of the men said. Another blanket materialized. Grace was lifted and wrapped in the folds of it. Blanche came out of her frozen shock. She began to cry loudly, trying to pull Grace up and into her own arms, with Eleanor holding her back. ‘All right, my lady,’ another fisherman reassured her. ‘I’ve seen enough drownings. This isn’t one, I can promise you. Your boys got to her quick enough. Not that they should have took her out there in the beginning.’ In her cocoon of blanket, Grace shook her head. Her face was as waxen as if she had really died, but she opened her mouth and spoke clearly. ‘It was my fault, you know. Not anyone else’s.’ The fisherman laughed. ‘You’re a proper little bull-beef, aren’t you? Here. Let’s get you inside in the warm. Your ma’ll want to get the doctor in to look at you, although I’d say you don’t need him any more’n I do.’ He lifted Grace up in his arms and carried her. Blanche followed, supported by Eleanor and Hills on either side, and the children trailed after them, back to the big house overlooking the sea. As soon as she was installed in her bed, propped up on pillows after the doctor’s visit, Grace seemed too strong ever to have brushed up against her own death. For a little while afterwards the boys even nicknamed her Bull-beef. Clio remembered it all her life not as the day Grace nearly drowned, but as the day when she became aware herself that all their lives were fragile, and temporary, and precious, rather than eternal and immutable as she had always assumed them to be. She recalled how the land had looked when they were drifting away from it in the Mabel, and now that inviting warmth seemed to touch everything she looked at. The most mundane nursery routines seemed sweet, and valuable, as if they might stop tomorrow, for ever. There must have been some maternal edict issued that morning for everything to continue as normal, more normally than normal, to lessen the shock for all of them. So the nannies whisked the older boys into dry jerseys and knickerbockers, and made Clio change her damp and sandy clothes, and by the time they had been brushed and tidied and inspected, and had drunk hot milk in the kitchen, the doctor had been and gone without any of them seeing him, and it was time for children’s lunch. There was fish and jam roly-poly, like any ordinary day. No one ate very much, except for Hugo who chewed stolidly. Clio wanted to cry out, Stay like this. Don’t let anything change. She wanted to put her arms around them all and hold them. But she kept silent, and pushed the heaps of roly-poly into the pools of custard on her plate. Later in the afternoon, Clio found the two nannies together in the cubbyhole where the linen was folded. There was the same scent of starch and cleanliness that had drawn her back on the beach into the safe hold of childhood, but now she saw that both of the women had been crying. She knew they were afraid they would be dismissed for letting Grace go out in the boat. ‘It isn’t fair,’ Clio said hotly. ‘You couldn’t have stopped her. I couldn’t, nobody could. Grace always does what she wants.’ Anger bubbled up in her. Nanny Cooper had been with the Hirshes since Jake was born. She came from a house in one of the little brick terraces of west Oxford. The children had often been taken to visit her ancient parents. It was unthinkable that Grace should be responsible for her being sent away. ‘Don’t you worry,’ Nanny tried to console her. But it was one of the signs of the new day that Clio didn’t believe what she said. In the evening Nathaniel arrived off the London train, summoned back early by Eleanor. He called the three boys singly into a stuffy little room off the hallway that nobody had yet found a use for. They came out one by one, with stiff faces, and went up to their beds. When it came to Clio’s turn to be summoned she slipped into the room and found her father sitting in an armchair with his head resting on one hand. His expression and posture was so familiar from bedtimes at home in Oxford that her awareness of the small world’s benevolent order and fears for its loss swept over her again. Nathaniel saw her face. ‘What is it, Clio?’ She had not meant to cry, but she couldn’t help herself. ‘I don’t want to grow up,’ she said stupidly. He held out his hand, and made her settle on his lap as she had done when she was very small. ‘You have to,’ he told her. ‘Today was the beginning of it, wasn’t it?’ ‘I suppose it was,’ Clio said at length. But she found that her father could still reassure her, as he always had. He told her that there was no question of any blame being placed on Nanny Cooper for what Grace had done. And he told her that the changes, whatever they were, would only come by slow degrees. It was just that from today she would be ready for them. ‘What about Grace?’ Clio asked. ‘Is today the first day for her, as well?’ ‘I don’t know so much about Grace,’ Nathaniel said gently. ‘I hope it is.’ Clio wanted to say some more, to make sure that Nathaniel knew Grace had insisted on going out in the Mabel, and that she had just been showing off when she leapt on to the seat. She supposed it was the same beginning to grow up that made her decide it would be better to keep quiet. She kissed her father instead, rubbing her cheek against the springy black mass of his beard. ‘Goodnight,’ she said quietly. As she went upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Grace she heard Nathaniel cross the hallway to the drawing room where the sisters were sitting together, and then the door closing on the low murmur of adult conversation. Grace was still lying propped up on her pillows. Her dark hair had been brushed and it spread out in waves around her small face. A fire had been lit in the little iron grate, and the flickering light on the ceiling brought back memories of the night nursery and baby illnesses. Clio found herself instinctively sniffing for the scent of camphorated oil. ‘What’s happening down there?’ Grace asked cheerfully. Clio didn’t return her smile. ‘Jake and Julius and Hugo have been put on the carpet for letting you out in the boat.’ ‘It can’t have been too serious,’ Grace answered. ‘Jake and Julius have just been in to say goodnight. I thanked them very prettily for saving my life. They seemed quite happy.’ ‘Aren’t you at all sorry for all the trouble you caused?’ Grace regarded her. ‘There isn’t anything to be gained from sorrow. It was an accident. I’m glad I’m not dead, that’s all.’ She stretched her arms lazily in her white nightgown. ‘I’m not ready to die. Nothing’s even begun yet.’ Clio didn’t try to say any more. She undressed in silence, and when she lay down she turned away from Grace and folded the sheet over her own head. In the night, Grace dreamt that she was in the water again. The black weight of it poured over her, filling her lungs and choking the life out of her. When she opened her eyes she could see tiny faces hanging in the light, a long way over her head, and she knew that she was already dead and lying in the ground. She woke up, soaked in her own sweat and with a scream of terror rising in her throat. But she didn’t give voice to the scream. She wouldn’t wake Clio, or Nanny who was asleep in the room next door. Instead she held her pillow in her arms and bit down into it to maintain her silence. She kicked off the covers that constricted her, too much like the horrible weight of water, and lay until she shivered with the cold air drying the sweat on her skin. At last, with her jaw aching from being clenched so tight, she knew that the nightmare had receded and she could trust herself not to cry out. Stiffly she drew the blankets over her shoulders and settled herself for sleep once again. Downstairs, after Clio and the boys had gone up to bed, Nathaniel went into the drawing room where his wife and sister-in-law were sitting together. They had changed for dinner, and in their gowns with lace fichus and jewels and elaborate coiffures there was no outward sign of the day’s disturbances. He had not expected that there would be. Blanche and Eleanor were alike in their belief that civilized behaviour was the first essential of life. Nathaniel had been fascinated from the first meeting with her to discover how unconventional Eleanor could be, and yet still obey the rigid rules of her class. She had married him, after all, a Jew and a foreigner, and still remained as impeccably of the English upper classes as her sister the Countess. He smiled at the sight of the two of them. Nathaniel kissed his wife fondly, and murmured to Blanche that she looked as beautiful as he had ever seen her, a credit to her own remarkable powers of composure after such a severe shock. Then he strolled away to the mahogany chiffonier and poured himself a large whisky and soda from the tray. ‘I still think we should try to reach John,’ Blanche announced. Nathaniel sighed. They had already agreed that John would have been out with the guns all day, and that now he would have returned there was no real necessity to disturb him. ‘What could he do?’ he repeated, reasonably. ‘Leave the man to his pheasants and cards. Grace is all right. I have dealt with the boys.’ Blanche closed her eyes for a moment, shuddered a little. ‘It was all so very frightening.’ Her sister rested a hand on her arm in sympathy, looking appealingly up at her husband. Nathaniel took a stiff pull at his drink. He didn’t like having to act the disciplinarian, as he had done this evening to the three boys, particularly when he saw clearly enough that it was Grace who had been at fault. The business had made him hungry, and he was looking forward to his dinner. He was congratulating himself on not having to sit down to it with fussy, whiskery, humourless John Leominster for company. He did not want him summoned now, or at any time before he had conveyed himself back to Town or to Oxford. ‘It’s all over now,’ he soothed her. ‘Try to see it as a useful experience for them. Learning that rules are not made just to curb their pleasure.’ And I sound just as pompous about it as Leominster himself, Nathaniel thought. He laughed his deep, pleasing, bass laugh and drank the rest of his whisky at a gulp. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Eleanor supported him, and at last Blanche inclined her elegant head. The little parlourmaid who performed the butler’s duties in the holiday house came in to announce to her ladyship that dinner was served. Nathaniel cheerfully extended an arm to each sister and they swept across the sand-scented hallway to the dining room. Nathaniel orchestrated the conversation ably, assisted by Eleanor, and they negotiated the entire meal without a single mention of death by drowning. At the end of it, when the ladies withdrew, Blanche was visibly happy again. There was no further mention of calling John back from his sport. Nathaniel sat over his wine for a little longer. He was thinking about the children, mostly about Grace. He had not tried to lecture her, as he had done the boys. He had sat on the edge of her bed instead. Grace had faced him with the expression that was such a subtle mingling of Blanche and Eleanor and his own dreamy, clever, ambiguous Clio, and yet made a sum total that was quite different from all of them. He thought he read, behind her defiant eyes, that Grace had already been frightened enough and needed no further punishment. They had talked instead about the girls learning to swim. He had made her laugh with imitations of the mothers’ reaction to the idea. Now that he was alone Nathaniel let himself imagine the threat of Grace’s death, the possibility that he had denied to the women. His fist clenched around the stem of his glass as the unwelcome images presented themselves. It came to him then that he loved his niece. There was determination in her, and there was something else, too. It was an awareness of her own female power, and a readiness to use it. She was magnetic. It was no wonder that his own boys were enslaved by her, Nathaniel thought. And then he put down his glass and laughed at himself. Grace was ten years old. There would come a time to worry about Grace and Jake, but it was not yet. Nathaniel strolled outside to listen to the sea. He sat and smoked a cigar, watching the glimmering whitish line of the breakers in the dark. Then he threw the stub aside and went up to his wife’s bedroom. Eleanor was sitting at her dressing table in her nightdress. Her long hair hung down and she was twisting it into a rope ready for bed. Nathaniel went to her and put his hands on her shoulders. He loved the straight line of her back, and the set of her head on her long neck. Very slowly he bent his head and put his mouth against the warm, scented skin beneath her earlobe. Watching their reflections in the glass he thought of Beauty and the Beast. His coarse black beard moved against her white skin and shining hair as he lifted his hands around her throat and began to undo the pearly buttons. ‘Nathaniel,’ Eleanor murmured. ‘Tonight, of all nights, after what has happened?’ ‘And what has happened? A childish escapade, with fortunately no damage done. All’s well, my love.’ He reassured her, as he had reassured Clio. All’s well. His hands moved inside her gown, spreading to lift the heavy weight of her breasts. He loved the amplitude of her, released from the day’s armour of whalebone and starch. She had a round, smooth belly, folds of dissolving flesh, fold on intricate fold. Eleanor gave a long sigh. She lifted her arms to place them around her husband’s neck. Her eyes had already gone hazy. Eleanor had had four children. Even from the beginning, when she was a girl of twenty who barely knew what men were supposed to do, she had enjoyed her husband’s love-making. But it had never been so good as it was now, now when they were nearly middle-aged. Sometimes, in the day-time, when she looked up from her letters or lowered her parasol, he could meet her eye and make her blush. He lifted her to her feet now so that she stood facing him. Nathaniel knelt down and took off her feathered satin slippers. Then he lifted up the hem of her nightgown to expose her blue-white legs. His beard tickled her skin as he laid his face against her thigh. An hour later, Eleanor and Nathaniel fell asleep in each other’s arms. In all the dark house, Grace was the only one who lay awake. She held on to her pillow, and waited for the water and her fears to recede. Two (#u2bf208d7-2a0d-5ee2-b00e-16756161e98b) ‘My mother was a Holborough, you know,’ Clio said. Elizabeth did know. She also knew that Clio’s grandmother had been Miss Constance Earley, who had married Sir Hubert Holborough, Bt, of Holborough Hall, Leicestershire, in 1875. Her daughters had been born in April 1877. Lady Holborough never fully recovered from the stress of the twin pregnancy and birth, and she lived the rest of her life as a semi-invalid. There were no more children. Blanche and Eleanor Holborough spent their childhood in rural isolation in Leicestershire, best friends as well as sisters. Elizabeth knew all this, and more. She had the family diaries, letters, Bibles, copies of birth and death certificates, the biographer’s weight of bare facts and forgotten feelings from which to flesh out her people. She thought she knew more about the history of their antecedents than Clio had ever done, and Clio had forgotten so much. Clio could not even remember what they had talked about last time they met. And yet Clio possessed rare pools of memory in which the water was so clear that she could stare down and see every detail of a single day, a day that had been submerged long ago by the flood of successive days pouring down upon it. Elizabeth wanted to lean over her shoulder and look into those pools too. That was why she came to sit in this room, with her miniature tape-recorder and her notebook, to look at reflections in still water. ‘A Holborough. Yes,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Mother used to tell me stories about when she was a little girl.’ When Blanche and Eleanor were girls, a hundred years ago. ‘What sort of stories?’ Clio gave her cunning look, to show that she was aware of the eagerness behind the question. ‘Stories …’ she said softly, on an expiring breath. There was a silence, and then she began. ‘Holborough was a fine house. Not on the scale of Stretton, of course, but it was the first house in the neighbourhood. There was a maze in the gardens. Mother and Aunt Blanche used to lead new governesses into it and lose them. They knew every leaf and twig themselves. They would slip away and leave the poor creatures to wander all the afternoon. Then the gardeners would hear the pitiful cries, and come to the rescue.’ Elizabeth had visited Holborough Hall. After it had been sold in the Twenties it had been a preparatory school and then in wartime a training camp for Army Intelligence officers. After the war it had stood empty, and then seen service as a school again. Lately it had become a conference centre. The famous maze had survived, just. It looked very small and dusty, marooned in a wide sea of tarmac on which delegates parked their cars. ‘Can’t you imagine them?’ Clio was saying. ‘Identical little girls in pinafores, whisking gleefully and silently down the green alleys?’ Elizabeth smiled. ‘Yes, I can imagine.’ ‘They had to make their own amusements. There were no other children. It wasn’t like it was for me, living in the middle of Oxford, with brothers and cousins always there.’ But it had been a happy childhood, Clio knew that, because Eleanor and Blanche often spoke of it. There had been carriage drives and calls with their mother, when she was well enough. There had been outings in winter to follow the hunt, with their father’s groom. Sir Hubert was an expert horseman. There had even been visits to London, to shop and to visit Earley relatives. There had been nannies and governesses and the affairs of the estate and the village. But most importantly of all, there had been the private world that they had created between them. It was a world governed only by their imaginations, a mutual creation that released them from the carpet-bedded gardens and the crowded mid-Victorian interiors of Holborough, and set them free. They made their own voyages, their own discoveries, even spoke their own language. The intimacy of it lasted them all their lives, even when the intricate games were long forgotten. Their imaginary world of play was put aside, reluctantly, when the real world judged that it was time for them to be grown up. Blanche and Eleanor accepted the judgement obediently, because they had been brought up to do as they were told, but they kept within themselves a component that remained childlike, together. Eleanor’s husband Nathaniel thought it was this buried streak of childishness that gave them their air of unconventionality buttoned within perfect propriety. He found it very alluring. When the twins reached the age of seventeen, Sir Hubert and Lady Holborough decided that their daughters must do the Season. Constance had been presented at Court as a d?butante, and in the same year she had been introduced to and then become engaged to Hubert. There had been little Society or London life for her in the years afterwards, because of her own ill-health and her husband’s addiction to field sports, but they were both agreed that there was no reason to deny their daughters their chances of a good marriage. Constance was apprehensive, and her nervousness took the form of vague illness. But still, a house was taken in Town, and more robust and cosmopolitan Earley aunts were enlisted to launch their nieces into Society. The twins brought few material or social advantages with them to London in 1895. Their father was a baronet of no particular distinction, except on the hunting field. Their mother came from an old family and had been a beauty in her day, but she had not been much seen for more than fifteen years. There was no great fortune on either side. But still, against the odds, perhaps because they didn’t care whether they were or not, the Misses Holborough were a success. They were not beautiful. They had tall foreheads and narrow, too-long noses, but they had handsome figures and large dark eyes and expressive mouths that often seemed to register private amusement. Nathaniel Hirsh was not the first man to be attracted by their obviously enjoyable unity in an exclusive company of two. They began to be invited, and then to be courted. Young men joked about declaring their love to a Miss Holborough on one evening, and then discovering on the next that they had fervently reiterated it to the wrong one. The joke was more often Blanche and Eleanor’s own. It amused them to tease. From infancy they had used their likeness to play tricks on nannies and governesses, and it seemed natural to extend the game to their dancing partners. They wore one another’s gowns and exchanged their feathered headdresses, became the other for a night and then switched back again. They acquired a reputation for liveliness that added to their appeal. One evening towards the end of the Season there was a ball at Norfolk House. Blanche and Eleanor had received their cards, and because Lady Holborough was unwell they were chaperoned by Aunt Frederica Earley. Sir Hubert escorted them, although he had no patience with either dancing or polite conversation. He was anxious for the tedium of parading his daughters through the marriage market to be over and done with, so he could return home to Leicestershire and his horses. He had already announced to his wife that he considered the whole affair to be a waste of his time and his money, since neither girl showed any inclination to choose a husband, or to do anything except whisper and giggle with her sister. The Duchess’s ballroom was crowded, and the twins were soon swept into the dancing. Their aunt, having married her own daughters, was free to watch them with proprietary approval. Blanche was in rose pink and Eleanor in silver. They looked elegant and they moved gracefully. They had no particular advantages, the poor lambs, but they would do. Mrs Earley was not worried about them. She was not the only onlooker who followed the swirls of rose pink and silver through the dance. There was an urbane-looking gentleman at the end of the room who watched the mirror faces as they swung, and smiled, and swung again. The room was full of reflections but these were brighter; their images doubled each other until the ballroom seemed full of dark hair and assertive noses and cool, interrogative glances. The gentleman inclined his head to one of the ladies who sat beside him. ‘Who are they?’ he asked. The woman fastened a button at the wrist of her long white glove. ‘They are the Misses Holborough,’ she answered. ‘Twins,’ she added unnecessarily, and with a touch of disapproval in her voice that made it sound as if it was careless of them. ‘They are interesting,’ the man said. ‘Do you know their family?’ ‘The lady in blue, over there, is their aunt. Mrs Earley. I am acquainted with her. Their mother is an invalid, I believe, and their father is a bore. I would be happy to give you any more information, if I possessed it.’ The man laughed. His companion had daughters in the room who were not yet married and who were much less intriguing than the Misses Holborough. He asked, ‘And may I be presented to Mrs Earley?’ A moment later, he was bowing over another gloved hand. ‘Mr John Singer Sargent,’ Mrs Earley’s acquaintance announced. ‘I should very much like to paint your nieces, Mrs Earley,’ the artist said. Mrs Earley was flattered, and agreed that it was a charming idea, but regretted that the suggestion would have to be put to Sir Hubert, her brother-in-law. When Sir Hubert re-appeared in the ballroom he was still smarting from the loss of fifty-six guineas at a friendly game of cards, and he was not in a good humour. Fortunately Mr Sargent had moved away, and was not in the vicinity to hear the response to his proposal. Sir Hubert said that he couldn’t imagine what the fellow was thinking of, wanting him to pay some no doubt colossal sum for a pretty portrait of two silly girls who had never had a sensible thought in their lives. The answer was certainly not. It was a piece of vanity, and he wanted to hear no more about it. ‘You make yourself quite clear, Hubert,’ Mrs Earley said, pressing her lips together. No wonder Constance was always indisposed, she thought. The ball was over. Blanche and Eleanor presented themselves with flushed cheeks and bright eyes and the pleasure of the latest tease reverberating between them. The Holboroughs’ carriage was called and the party made its way home, to Sir Hubert’s obvious satisfaction. The end of the Season came. The lease on the town house ran out and the family went back to Holborough Hall. Blanche and Eleanor were the only ones who were not disappointed by the fact that there was no news of an engagement for either of them. They had had a wonderful time, and they were ready to repeat the experience next year. They had no doubt that they could choose a husband apiece when they were quite ready. The autumn brought the start of the hunting season. For Sir Hubert it was the moment when the year was reborn. From the end of October to the beginning of March, from his estate outside the hunting town of Melton Mowbray, Sir Hubert could ride to hounds if he wished on six days of every week. There were five days with the Melton packs, the Quorn, the Cottesmore and the Belvoir, and a sixth to be had with the Fernie in South Leicestershire. There were ten hunters in the boxes in the yard at Holborough for Sir Hubert and his friends, and a bevy of grooms to tend them and to ride the second horses out to meet the hunt at the beginning of the afternoon’s sport. The hall filled up with red-faced gentlemen whose conversation did not extend beyond horses and hunting. They rode out during the day, and in the evenings they ate and drank, played billiards, and gambled heavily. Now that they were out, Blanche and Eleanor were expected to join the parties for dinner. They listened dutifully to the hunting talk, and kept their mother company after dinner in the drawing room, while the men sat over their port or adjourned to the card tables in the smoking room. ‘Is this what it will be like when we are married?’ Blanche whispered, trying to press a yawn back between her lips. ‘It depends upon whom we marry, doesn’t it?’ Eleanor said, with a touch of grimness that was new to her. Then one night there was a new guest at dinner, a little younger and less red-faced than Sir Hubert’s usual companions. He was introduced to the Holborough ladies as the Earl of Leominster. They learnt that Lord Leominster lived at Stretton, in Shropshire, and that he also owned a small hunting box near Melton. The house was usually let for the season, but this year the owner was occupying it himself with a small party of friends. Sir Hubert and his lordship had met when they enjoyed a particularly good day out with the Quorn and, both of them having failed to meet their grooms at dusk, they had hacked part of the way home together. Lord Leominster had accepted his new friend’s invitation to dine. On the first evening, Eleanor and Blanche regarded him without much favour. John Leominster was a thin, fair-skinned man in his early thirties. He had a dry, careful manner that made an odd contrast with the rest of Sir Hubert’s vociferous friends. ‘Quiet sort of fellow,’ Sir Hubert judged. ‘Can’t tell what he’s thinking. But he goes well. Keen as mustard over the fences, you should see him.’ Lady Holborough quickly established that his lordship was unmarried. ‘Just think, girls,’ she whispered. ‘What a chance for one of you. Stop smirking, Eleanor, do. It isn’t funny at all.’ The girls rolled their eyes at each other. Lord Leominster seemed very old and hopelessly shrivelled from their eighteen-year-old standpoint. They were much more interested in the cavalry officers from the army remount depot in Melton. But it soon became clear that the twins had attracted his attention, as they drew everyone else’s that winter. Against the brown setting of Holborough they were as exotic and surprising as a pair of pink camellias on a February morning. After the first dinner he called again, and then became a regular visitor. It was also evident, from the very beginning, that he could tell the two of them apart as easily as their mother could. There were no mischievous games of substitution. Eleanor was Eleanor, and Blanche was the favoured one. John Leominster became the first event in their lives that they did not share, did not dissect between them. Eleanor was startled and hurt, and she took refuge in mockery. She called him Sticks for his thin legs, and before she spoke she cleared her throat affectedly in the way that Leominster did before making one of his considered pronouncements. She made sure that Blanche saw his finicky ways with gloves and handkerchiefs, and waited for her sister to join her in the mild ridicule. But Blanche did not, and they became aware that a tiny distance was opening between them. Blanche was torn. After the first evening she felt guilty in not responding to Eleanor’s overtures, but she began to feel flattered by the Earl of Leominster’s attention. She was also surprised to discover how pleasant it was to be singled out for herself alone, instead of always as one half of another whole. As the days and then the weeks passed, she was aware of everyone in the household watching and waiting to see what would happen, and of Constance almost holding her breath. She saw her suitor’s thin legs and fussy manners as clearly as her sister did, but then she thought, The Countess of Leominster … One night Eleanor asked impulsively, ‘What are you going to do, Blanche? About Sticks, I mean?’ ‘Don’t call him that. I can’t do anything. I have to wait for him to offer, don’t I?’ Eleanor stared at her. Until that moment she had not fully understood that her sister meant to accept him if he did propose marriage. ‘Oh, Blanchie. You can’t marry him. You don’t love him, do you?’ Blanche pulled out a long ringlet of hair and wound it round her forefinger. It was a characteristic mannerism, familiar to Eleanor from their earliest years. ‘I love you,’ Eleanor shouted. ‘I won’t let him take you away.’ ‘Shh, Ellie.’ Blanche was deeply troubled. ‘We both have to marry somebody, someday, don’t we? If I don’t love him now, I can learn to. He’s a kind man. And there’s the title, and Stretton, and everything else. I can’t turn him down, can I?’ Eleanor shouted again. ‘Yes, you can. Neither of us will marry anyone. We’ll live together. Who needs a husband?’ Slowly, Blanche shook her head. ‘We do. Women do,’ she whispered. Eleanor saw that her sister was crying. There were tears in her own eyes, and she stood up and put her arms round Blanche. ‘Go on, go on then. Make yourself a Countess. Just have me to stay in your house. Let me be aunt to all the little Strettons. Just try to stop me being there.’ Blanche answered, ‘I won’t. I never would.’ They cried a little, shedding tears for the end of their childhood. And then, with a not completely disagreeable sense of melancholy, they agreed that they had better sleep or else look like witches in the morning. There came the evening of an informal dance held in the wooden hall of the village next to Holborough. The twins dressed in their rose pink and silver, and sighed that Beecham village hall was a long way from Norfolk House. But there was a large contingent of whooping army officers at Beecham, and there was also John Leominster. While Eleanor was passed from arm to arm in the energetic dancing, Blanche agreed that she would take a respite from the heat and noise, and stroll outside the hall with her partner. Lady Holborough inclined her head to give permission as they passed the row of chaperones, and Blanche knew that all their eyes were on them as they passed out into the night. It was a mild evening, but she drew her fur wrap tightly around her shoulders like a protective skin. She was ready, but she was also afraid. They walked, treading carefully over the rough ground. ‘Blanche, you know that I would very much like you to see Stretton, and to introduce you to my mother.’ Blanche inclined her head, but she said nothing. John cleared his throat. She was irresistibly reminded of Eleanor’s mimicry, but she made herself put Eleanor out of her mind, and concentrate on what was coming. It was, she knew, the most important moment of her life. If it seemed disappointing that it should have come now, outside the barn-like hall at the end of a rutted country lane, then she put her disappointment aside and waited. ‘I think you know what I want to say to you. Blanche, my dear, will you marry me?’ There was nothing more to wait for. There it was, spoken. ‘Yes, John. I will,’ Blanche said. Her voice sounded very small. He stopped walking and took her in his arms. His lips, when they touched hers, were soft and dry and they did not move. That seemed to be all there was. ‘I shall speak to your father in the morning,’ John said. He took her hand and they turned to walk back towards the hall. ‘You make me very happy,’ he said. ‘I’m glad,’ Blanche answered. After the engagement was announced, his lordship seemed to become aware of the bond between his fianc?e and her twin sister. It was as if he could safely acknowledge its existence, now that he had made sure of Blanche for himself. He reminisced about how he had first seen them, coming arm in arm into the drawing room at Holborough. ‘As lovely as a pair of swans on a lake,’ he said, surprising them with a rare verbal flourish. Blanche smiled at him, and he put his hand on her arm. He took the opportunity to tell the sisters he wished to have their portrait painted. The double portrait would mark his engagement to Blanche, but it would also celebrate the Misses Holborough. He had already chosen the artist. It was to be Sargent. When the spring came, Lady Holborough and her daughters removed to London. Blanche’s wedding clothes and trousseau needed to be bought, and there were preparations to be made for Eleanor’s second Season. They settled at Aunt Frederica Earley’s house, and in the intervals between shopping and dressmakers’ appointments the twins presented themselves for sittings at Mr Sargent’s studio. They enjoyed their afternoons with the painter. He had droll American manners, he made them laugh, and he listened with amusement to their talk. The portrait, as it emerged, reflected their rapport. The girls were posed on a green velvet-padded love seat. Blanche faced forwards, dressed in creamy silk with ruffles of lace at her throat and elbows. Her head was tilted to one side, as if she was listening to her sister’s talk, although her dark eyes looked straight out of the canvas. Her forefinger marked her place in the book on her lap. Eleanor faced in the opposite direction, but the painter had turned her so that she looked back over her own shoulder, her eyes following the same direction as her sister’s. Their mouths were painted as if they were on the point of curving into smiles, the eyes were bright with laughter and the dark eyebrows arched questioningly over them. Eleanor wore sky-blue satin, with a navy-blue velvet ribbon around her throat. Their white, rounded forearms rested side by side on the serpentine back of the love seat. It was a pretty pose. The girls looked what they were, identically young and innocent and good-humoured. There was no need for Mr Sargent to soften any of the sharpness of his vision with superficial flattery. He painted what had first attracted him in the ballroom at Norfolk House, twin images of lively inexperience. ‘You have made us look too pretty,’ Eleanor told him. ‘I have painted you as I see you,’ he answered. ‘I can do no more, and I would not wish to do less.’ ‘We look happy,’ Blanche observed. ‘And so you should,’ John Sargent told her, with the advantage of more than twenty years’ longer experience of the world. ‘You should be happy.’ Even then, the girls understood that he had captured their girlhood for them on canvas, just at the point when it was ending. The Misses Holborough was judged a success. John Leominster paid for the double portrait, and after the wedding it was transported to Stretton where it was hung in the saloon. Blanche sometimes hesitated in front of it, sighing as she passed by. Eleanor was often at Stretton with her, but she could not always be there. Blanche missed her, but she was also occupied with trying to please her husband, and with the peculiar responsibilities of taking over from her mother-in-law as the mistress of the old house. The separation was much harder for Eleanor. The dances and dinners of the second Season were no longer a novelty. They were also much less amusing without Blanche, who was away in Italy on her wedding journey all through the height of it. A small compensation for Eleanor was a new friendship with her cousin Mary, the younger daughter of Aunt Frederica Earley. Mary had married a languid and very handsome man called Norton Ferrier, and the Ferriers were part of a group of smart, young, well-connected couples who prided themselves on their powers of intellectual and aesthetic discrimination. They called their circle the Souls, and they spent weekends in one another’s comfortable houses in the country, reading modern poetry and writing letters and diaries and discussing art. Mary was kind-hearted and generous, and she began to invite her young cousin to accompany Norton and herself on their weekend visits. Constance was glad to let her go, and there could be no objection to Eleanor making excursions in the company of her older married cousin. The Souls were sophisticated and under-occupied. Once their conventional marriages had set them free, they were at liberty to wander within the limits of their miniature world and amuse themselves by falling in and out of love with one another. Most of them had one or two young children. They had done their family duty, and they left their heirs at home in their nurseries while they travelled to one another’s houses to play, and to talk, and to pursue their romantic interests. At night the corridors of the old houses whispered with footsteps. The mute family portraits looked down on the secret transpositions. There was one house in a village near Oxford that Eleanor liked particularly. It was an ancient grey stone house, set in a beautiful walled garden. Eleanor liked to wander on her own along the stone paths, breathing in the scents and bending down to examine a leaf or a tiny flower beside her shoe. At Fernhaugh she was perfectly happy to leave the Souls to their books and their mysterious murmurings, and to enjoy herself amongst the plants. She was, she told herself with a touch of mournful pride, learning to be by herself. And at the same time she wondered if she could persuade Blanche to begin the creation of a garden like this somewhere in the Capability Brown park at Stretton. One Sunday morning at Fernhaugh Eleanor was walking in the garden. There had been rain overnight and the perfume was intensified by the damp air. She knew that some of the house party had dutifully gone to church to hear their host reading the lesson, but that most of the Souls were not yet downstairs. There were guests expected for luncheon, but the drawing room with the French windows looking out on the terrace was still empty. Even the gardeners would not appear today. The green enclosure in all its glory was hers alone. Eleanor wandered, breathing in the richness, letting her fingers trail over dewy leaves and fat, fleshy petals. She felt for a moment as if she might at last aspire to the sensuous abandon of the real Souls. She let her eyes close, feeling the garden absorb her into its green heart. From close at hand, too close, an unfamiliar voice asked, ‘Are you all right?’ Eleanor’s eyes snapped open. She saw a man she had never met, a big man in odd black clothes made even odder-looking by his big, thick black beard. He must have come silently over the grass, although his feet looked big enough to make a clatter on any surface. ‘I am perfectly all right. Why should you think I am not?’ ‘I wondered if you were going to faint. Or worse, perhaps.’ It came to her how she must have looked, drooping with closed eyes between the soaking leaves, and her face turned red. ‘Thank you, but there’s no danger of anything like that. Unless as the result of shock. From being pounced on in an unguarded moment by a perfect stranger.’ ‘By a peculiar-looking person far from perfect, don’t you mean?’ The man was smiling. His beard seemed to spread around his jawline. The smile revealed his shiny mouth and healthy white teeth. ‘I don’t mean anything,’ Eleanor said, retreating from this newcomer. ‘Will you excuse me? I should go and make myself ready for luncheon.’ To her surprise, the man turned and began to walk with her across the grass towards the house. He strolled companionably with his hands behind his back, looking from side to side. ‘This garden is very beautiful,’ he said. And then, peering sideways at Eleanor with unmistakable mischief, he recited, “Sed vos hortorum per opaca silentia longe Celerant plantae virides, et concolor umbra.” Do you know the lines?’ Blanche and Eleanor’s governesses had had to negotiate too many other obstacles at Holborough. There had been little time to spare for Latin verse. ‘No,’ Eleanor said. She was thinking that the man was not such a misfit at Fernhaugh as his appearance suggested. No doubt the Souls would all be familiar with the verse, whatever it was. Or would at least claim to be. ‘No? It’s Marvell, of course. He is addressing Innocence. He finds her in the shaded silences of gardens, far off, hiding among the green plants and like-coloured shadow.’ ‘Thank you so much for the translation.’ Eleanor took refuge in briskness. They had reached the terrace and the open doors of the drawing room were only a few steps away. ‘Don’t let me detain you any further in your search for Innocence amongst the rose-bushes.’ The man was smiling again, looking full into her face. He seemed very large and dark and exotic in the English summer garden. He wouldn’t let her go so easily. ‘In the absence of our hostess, may I introduce myself? I am Nathaniel Hirsh.’ ‘Eleanor Holborough.’ The man’s hand enveloped hers. The grip was like a bear’s. ‘And now you must excuse me.’ Eleanor mounted the two steps to the terrace level and passed out of the sunshine into the dimness of the drawing room. Nathaniel watched her go. He was thinking with irritation that although he had been born in England, and had lived in England for most of his twenty-six years, he would never make an Englishman. He could never get the subtle nuances of behaviour quite right. He could never even get the broad principles. Today he had arrived for luncheon at least an hour too early. Then he had seen a striking girl daydreaming in the wonderful garden. An Englishman would have approached her with some stiff-necked platitude and she would have known exactly how to respond. But instead he had pounced on her with some clumsy joke. And then he had begun declaiming in Latin. Innocence amongst the green plants and like-coloured shadow, indeed. Yet, that was how she had looked. ‘You will never learn, Nathaniel,’ he said aloud. But he was humming as he leant over and picked a yellow rose from the branch trailing over the terrace wall. He slid the stem into his buttonhole. He had liked the look of Eleanor Holborough. He had liked even better her cool admission of ignorance of Marvell’s Hortus. Nathaniel did not think many of the other guests at Fernhaugh would have acknowledged as much. He liked Philip Haugh well enough, but he did not have much patience with the rest of the crew. He reminded himself now that he had accepted Philip’s luncheon invitation in order to come and observe the idle wealthy at play, and to be amused by them. He could see Lady Haugh beyond the drawing-room doors, so he judged that it was at last the acceptable time to arrive. Nathaniel felt familiar exasperation. How could he have known that the fashionable hour was so much later than stated? But now that he was here he would go in and be amused, as he had intended, and at the same time he would take the opportunity of seeing where Eleanor Holborough fitted into this languid coterie. When Eleanor came into the drawing room again the rest of the guests were assembled. She looked around quickly and saw Nathaniel Hirsh. He was talking to Philip Haugh and Norton Ferrier. Beside Philip’s well-bred colourlessness and Norton’s perfectly sculpted feminine beauty it surprised her to see how very large and dishevelled and red-blooded he looked. From time to time his huge, booming bass laugh filled the murmuring room. Eleanor sensed that the other guests had to restrain themselves from turning around to stare. And to her surprise she felt her sympathy was with Nathaniel, rather than with Mary and Norton and their friends. What had he said or done to make her feel that they were a special minority of two? Nathaniel had seen her, but he made no effort to navigate his way through the party to her side. Eleanor concentrated very hard on the conversation immediately around her, and wondered why not. She need not have worried. Nathaniel had already discovered from Lady Haugh that they were to be seated together at the luncheon table. He was waiting for his chance. There was no formal taking-in at Fernhaugh, but when Lady Haugh leant elegantly on Norton Ferrier’s arm and drifted towards the dining room, Nathaniel materialized at Eleanor’s side. Philip Haugh murmured the briefest introduction. Nathaniel took her hand and bowed over it, as though they had never seen each other before. On his arm Eleanor felt small and light, as if the toes of her shoes barely touched the floor. ‘Now then,’ he said as they sat down, ‘we can talk. Tell me exactly who you are, and what you are doing here.’ Eleanor told him, and he listened intently. For the first time, she talked about herself without referring to Blanche. She laid out the bare facts of her life as if it had been hers alone, and just as Blanche had done she discovered that it was agreeable to be reckoned with for herself, instead of as one half of a whole. It was more agreeable still just to sit with this unusual, suddenly solemn man looking into her eyes. The food came and went. The partners on their opposite sides were brutally neglected. Mary Ferrier caught Lady Haugh’s eye, and they exchanged a small, surprised moue. ‘I have a twin sister,’ Eleanor said at length, touched by a finger of guilt. ‘She was married earlier this year.’ ‘You miss her,’ Nathaniel remarked, as if stating what was obvious. ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘Are you very alike?’ ‘We are identical.’ Nathaniel’s thick eyebrows drew together. When he opened his mouth Eleanor saw the movement of his tongue and the elastic contraction of his lips. She had never been so sharply aware of anyone’s physical nearness, of the few inches of air and layers of cloth between them. She should have glanced away, but she let his eyes hold hers. ‘I don’t think so,’ Nathaniel said softly. ‘I believe you are unique.’ Eleanor did look away, then. She turned deliberately to her neighbour on the other side, and began a conversation about architecture. She did not turn back until she was sure of herself, and when she did speak to Nathaniel again it was in an attempt to take control. ‘You haven’t told me who or what you are. It’s your turn to confess now.’ To her disgust Eleanor knew that she sounded arch rather than commanding. Nathaniel’s mouth twitched in the depths of his beard. ‘I am a teacher. I live in Oxford.’ That was all. Lady Haugh was standing up. Eleanor rose and followed her. When they sat down in the drawing room with their coffee cups, Eleanor found herself on a sofa between Mary and her hostess. ‘What did you think of our friend Mr Hirsh?’ Frances Haugh asked her, ready to be amused. ‘I liked him,’ Eleanor said. She hadn’t learnt the Souls’ way of pretending to feel less, or more, or something different. ‘Who is he?’ ‘He’s a friend of Philip’s. He is very clever; last year he was elected a Fellow of All Souls. He is a don, a linguist, I believe. Eccentric in the way that people of that sort often are. And he is Jewish, of course.’ Eleanor had met plenty of Jews during her two Seasons. There were dozens of them in the new aristocracy. Many of them were rich, and most of them were good company. They were invited everywhere, and hostesses were pleased to welcome them whilst congratulating themselves at the same time on their own enlightened attitudes. Now that she thought about it, Eleanor realized that of course Nathaniel Hirsh was a Jew. And at the same time she knew that he was different from the bankers and financiers and manufacturers she had met in the London ballrooms. They were indistinguishable except by name from the old families. Nathaniel was distinguishable. Nathaniel was distinguishable from everyone else she had met in her life. She didn’t want to label him, Jewish or not, suitable or otherwise. He was, she understood, above that. When he came to claim her from between Mary and Frances, Eleanor went with him. Mary watched them go out into the garden, and then shrugged her pretty shoulders. ‘Whatever will Aunt Constance think?’ she wondered, and laughed faintly. Eleanor and Nathaniel walked the shady paths together. They could never remember afterwards what they talked about, only that there was a great deal to say. The sun moved and dipped behind the garden’s fringe of elms. When it was time for Nathaniel to leave, he took her hand. He lifted it to his mouth and held it there. The beard was soft on her skin, black against the whiteness. ‘May I call again tomorrow?’ ‘I go back to Town tomorrow afternoon, with my cousin.’ ‘I will call in the morning.’ Nathaniel said. Eleanor smiled at him, and he saw all the light of the day in her face. That evening, Eleanor sat down at the writing table in her bedroom and began a letter to Blanche. She had been intending to tell her sister everything; about how Nathaniel Hirsh had appeared in the garden at Fernhaugh and had immediately occupied the middle of her private landscape. He had made her see how bland the scenery was before he came. But then she thought of Blanche and John Leominster together, and of the tentative, sometimes puzzled way they seemed to defer to one another. She had never seen John Leominster look the way Nathaniel had looked at her today, and she didn’t believe Blanche had ever known the mixture of happy anticipation and certainty and dazzlement that she felt tonight. Eleanor sighed, resting her chin in her hand and thinking of the miraculous day that had produced Nathaniel. Then she put down her pen. She never completed the letter. Nathaniel went slowly back to Oxford. He was considering the other women he knew, the dark, exuberant daughters of his mother’s friends and the few University ladies and the wives of his colleagues. None of them had Eleanor Holborough’s air of opposites combined, of originality within the conventional, of passion contained by propriety. None of them even seemed to Nathaniel to be as perfectly beautiful as Eleanor. He had accepted the invitation to Fernhaugh intending to listen and watch, and he came back having fallen in love. The next morning, when he was leaving her again, Nathaniel kissed Eleanor on the mouth. She turned her face up to his, and kissed him back. There was no reason not to. They were honest with each other. Afterwards, when he had gone, Mary and Frances looked speculatively at her. They were too discreet to ask direct questions, and Eleanor had enough self-possession to give nothing away. But her senses were sharpened by the feelings Nathaniel had stirred in her. She looked around Fernhaugh, and suddenly understood what she saw. As they were leaving the old house and Norton Ferrier bent his sleek head to kiss Frances Haugh goodbye, Eleanor felt as if her eyes had been opened. There was plenty for her to think about on the journey back to London. ‘What will you tell my mother and Aunt Constance about Mr Hirsh?’ Mary asked slyly. ‘The truth,’ Eleanor was composed. ‘When the right time comes.’ They wrote to each other every day of the next week, letters of deepening affection. Eleanor discovered that Nathaniel was steeped in Goethe and Dante as well as Andrew Marvell, and her own responses seemed stilted and childish in answer to the fluently romantic pages he poured out to her. But Nathaniel answered that he loved her letters, and would keep them for ever. He also warned her, as gently as he could, that there might never come a right time to announce to their families that they intended to marry. Nathaniel was right to be apprehensive. The news was greeted with even stronger opposition from Levi and Dora Hirsh than from the Holboroughs. The Hirshes wanted a Jewish daughter-in-law and Jewish grandchildren even more than Lady Holborough wanted another Countess in the family. There were months of separations, and tearful reunions, and bitter family arguments. In the end, Eleanor’s conviction that all would finally be well was justified. The Holboroughs capitulated first, and agreed that their daughter could throw herself away on a teacher, a foreigner, and a Jew, if that was what she really wished for. The Hirshes took a little longer to give way, but at last they consented to welcome Eleanor into their family. And then, once the decision had been made, she was received with much more warmth than Nathaniel was ever to know from the Holboroughs. Miss Eleanor Holborough was married quietly in London to Mr Nathaniel Hirsh, of New College, Oxford, on June 28, 1897. It was almost exactly a year since they had met in the garden at Fernhaugh. The Countess of Leominster was in an interesting condition. Blanche was at Stretton, preparing for the birth of her first child. When the time came, Eleanor travelled north to be with her sister. She had only been married for three months and it was hard to leave Nathaniel. But Blanche was begging her to go, and Eleanor couldn’t think of refusing. Nathaniel consoled her, when he took her to the station for the Shrewsbury train, with a promise that while she was away he would find a house for them to buy. Nathaniel had given up his bachelor rooms in college, of course, and they had spent the first weeks of their marriage living in a little rented house at Iffley. Home-making in it had reminded Eleanor of dolls’ house games with Blanche. She protested that she was quite happy where they were, but Nathaniel had other ideas. ‘We need a big house,’ he told her. ‘A proper house, for a family. A real home. I’ll find it, and when you come back you can tell me if you approve. Then all we will need is children to fill it up.’ ‘Nathaniel,’ whispered Eleanor, looking around to see if anyone might overhear. But she was only pretending to reprove him. Nathaniel wanted a big family, and she knew quite well that they were doing everything possible to achieve the beginning of one. They did it in the mornings, and in the quiet afternoons when Nathaniel came back from his tutorials, as well as in the proper shelter of the night. They regularly created their own world of feather pillows and tangled black hair and white skin, and Eleanor was surprised by how natural and how good it felt. On her wedding night she had known next to nothing, and Nathaniel had no more practical experience than she did. But he knew what to do, as he seemed to know everything else, and he guided her confidently. They learned quickly, together. Eleanor had been ashamed, at first, of the way her body led her. She had believed that she should be passive and reticent, and meekly let Nathaniel do whatever it was he needed to do to her. But then she had discovered another Eleanor within herself, this Eleanor who would not be subdued except by what her husband did. It was not a matter of allowing him, as she had imagined, but of meeting him halfway. Sometimes, to Nathaniel’s delight, it was more than halfway. Then she heard the other Eleanor scream out in the intensity of her response. She had been ashamed until Nathaniel told her that there was nothing they could do together, in the seclusion of her bed, that was either wrong or unnatural. She believed him, as she believed everything he said. ‘Come back soon,’ Nathaniel whispered, when he had installed her trunk and boxes in the train with their little Iffley housemaid who would be her lady’s maid at Stretton. ‘I wish I was coming with you.’ He did wish it. He liked to see his wife and her twin sister together. The double vision intensified his pleasure in the secret Eleanor known only to him, as well as tantalizing him with a sense of the other secrets the sisters shared only with each other. He thought, sometimes, of what it would be like to have the two of them together … ‘That would be quite unsuitable,’ Eleanor rebuked him. ‘This is a time for women.’ ‘Not when my children are born. You won’t banish me then.’ ‘You will have to wait and see what happens when the time comes, Nathaniel.’ The train was on the point of departure. Eleanor smiled up at him from under the brim of her feathered hat. She suspected that they would not have so very long to wait. ‘Come back soon,’ he ordered her. ‘I didn’t marry you to have to spend more than a day without you.’ ‘I will,’ she promised him. ‘As soon as I’m sure Blanche doesn’t need me any longer.’ Nathaniel stood on the platform waving until the train was out of sight. At Shrewsbury, Lord Leominster’s groom was waiting with the carriage to drive Eleanor to Stretton. The approach to the house was by a winding carriage drive through the trees of the park. By this time Eleanor was familiar enough with the view to be ready for the sight of Stretton itself, but the size of it still made her catch her breath at the first glimpse. The trees suddenly gave way to reveal a lake and a bridge and the house standing on a vast slope of grass beyond the water. The original house was very old, but in the eighteenth century an ambitious Earl had commissioned Robert Adam to extend it and impose the appropriate grandeur on the south front. Now two short wings curved outwards from the main body and a dome had been added to crown the new composition. The centrepiece of this symmetrical arrangement was a porch raised on eight stone pillars, reached by a pair of stone staircases that rose from the gravelled drive. The effect was magnificent, but the Leominster fortunes had never properly recovered from the expense. The comparison of Stretton’s creamy stone bulk with her cottage at Iffley made Eleanor smile a little as she was handed down at the porch steps. The butler who swept down to meet her assured her that her ladyship was waiting anxiously upstairs. Eleanor almost ran in his stately wake. She found Blanche in the doorway of her own small drawing room on the first floor, and the sisters fell into each other’s arms. ‘You look so well, and pretty,’ Eleanor exclaimed when they were alone. Blanche did look well, dressed in a loose blue robe that almost hid her bulk. She rested one hand proudly on the summit of it. ‘Sir John says that it will be any day.’ Sir John Williams was her obstetrician. ‘I wish it would come.’ ‘And this is so cosy.’ Eleanor walked admiringly round the room. It was decorated in pale blue and eau-de-nil, with watercolour landscapes on the panelled walls. It was new since her last visit, and she thought how well it suited Blanche. The Adam interiors of the rest of the house were very fine, but they had been left untouched for a hundred years. The fabrics were beginning to decay, and there was an air of chilly gloom. ‘John ordered it for me. It is so comfortable to have somewhere pretty and warm to sit. I spend all my days in here. Oh, Eleanor, how glad I am that you are here.’ Blanche sat down on her blue sofa and patted the place beside her. ‘Let me look properly at you.’ With her head on one side, she examined her sister’s face. She saw contentment in every line of it, and something else too. There was a richness, a new lustre that she had not seen before. ‘And I can see that you are well.’ Eleanor smiled. ‘I don’t feel so very magnificent. I suffer from sickness. I believe … Blanchie, I haven’t even told Nathaniel yet, but I think I may be in the same condition as you are.’ After hugging and exclaiming, the sisters sat back to look at one another again. They felt that as married women, both carrying children, there were matters to be discussed that they could not have touched on before, for all their closeness. Blanche said delicately, ‘Tell me, Eleanor, how do you find the married part of marriage?’ She saw that her sister’s mouth looked fuller than it had been, and her eyes were soft. There was colour warming her neck and cheeks. ‘Surprising, at first,’ Eleanor said. And then, laughing, ‘But afterwards, like … finding out the answer to a riddle. A rather good riddle, with a particularly satisfying solution.’ ‘A riddle?’ Blanche was staring at her, uncomprehending. ‘Yes, just that. One that you have half overheard, and never understood before. And you?’ ‘John is very good,’ Blanche answered, aware that it was no answer, any more than Eleanor’s had seemed. But John was good, she told herself. He did not trouble her so very often, and when he did materialize in her bedroom, sliding in in the darkness to lie briefly on top of her, he seemed so insubstantial, so thin and light that she wondered if he was completely there. Afterwards he would whisper to her, ‘I’m sorry, my dear. Will you forgive me?’ Blanche had no idea why her forgiveness should be necessary, because she had not felt particularly violated, but she gave it readily. She was fond of her husband, and recognized his kindness. After waiting a moment, Eleanor realized that Blanche would say no more. She murmured, ‘Yes. I’m sure he is.’ She was remembering the letter she had started to write to Blanche on the night of meeting Nathaniel. She had known then that it was not the right thing to finish and post it. Eleanor stood up and went to Blanche. She kissed the top of her head, in the middle where the dark hair parted to reveal the white skin beneath. Then she wandered to the window, and looked down at the wide park. ‘Will the baby be an heir for John and all this?’ ‘I am quite sure it is a boy, and so is John,’ Blanche said composedly. Blanche’s son was born a week later, and named Hugo John. By family tradition he took his father’s second title, Viscount Culmington. It was an easy, uncomplicated birth. Eleanor stayed with her sister until she was well enough to leave her rooms, and then she travelled back to Nathaniel with her own news. Seven months later, in April 1898, Jacob Nathaniel Hirsh was born in Oxford, arriving as quickly and easily as his cousin Hugo had done. Before his son’s birth Nathaniel had found the family house he had always intended to own. It was to the north of city, in the Woodstock Road, in the heart of an area of solid new houses colonized by the first generation of University dons who were allowed to marry and live outside their colleges. It was a tall red-brick building that reared up from its newly planted garden and loomed over the quiet road like a Gothic castle in miniature. There were arched windows at a dozen different levels, doors in unexpected recesses and a round turret topped off with its own pinnacle of purplish slate. Inside there was a good deal of stained glass and polished mahogany, and short flights of shallow stairs leading from one mystifying level to the next. It had ten inconveniently sited bedrooms and only one bathroom; it cost much more money than they could afford; and Eleanor and Nathaniel both loved it. The new house stood on an oddly shaped three-quarters of an acre plot, which Eleanor claimed at once as her own with the garden at Fernhaugh as her model. By the time Jacob was born, she felt her house and her garden fitting around her as comfortably as a shell enclosing an oyster. She told Nathaniel that he had better find that it suited him too, because she had no intention of ever living anywhere else. ‘It is too big,’ Nathaniel protested. ‘All these rooms, just for us and Jakie and his nurse and a couple of maids. We need more children, Eleanor. We need to fill up the house. I want a dozen children, a whole team, a chamber orchestra.’ Eleanor laughed at him. ‘A dozen? How will we feed them all?’ The Hirshes had very little money. ‘Leave that to me. I shall be Professor Hirsh before you know it.’ Eleanor didn’t doubt it. She was proud of her husband’s growing academic reputation, and she was glad to see the students who began to flock to their house to hear him talk. ‘A chamber orchestra it shall be then,’ she agreed with mock obedience. Nathaniel loved music almost as much as he loved books. In the next year Eleanor made a long summer visit to Stretton, taking Jake with her, and the sisters sat tranquilly in the shade of Capability Brown’s trees with their babies beside them. Blanche came to Oxford in her turn, and discovered how much she enjoyed the Hirshes’ unconventional domestic life after the formalities of Stretton. Eleanor often forgot to order food; the Irish cook was no more reliable; Nathaniel could turn up with two or twenty hungry undergraduates at any hour of the day; but the odd corners of the red-brick miniature castle were full of the twins’ laughter all through Blanche’s visit. Their only regret was that their husbands would never be friends. John Leominster was courteous, but he clearly regarded Nathaniel as a dangerous barbarian. And where Eleanor had made gentle fun of her brother-in-law, Nathaniel’s jokes were sharper, rooted in his mistrust of the English aristocracy itself. But both men liked to see their sisters-in-law, and Eleanor and Blanche contented themselves with that much. Towards the end of 1900, when Jake was well out of babyhood and Nathaniel was beginning to be anxious and impatient, Eleanor discovered that she was expecting another child. Her husband’s delight at the news touched her deeply, and she remembered his wish to be the father to an entire orchestra. She could only be pleased for Nathaniel’s sake when her doctor told her a little later that she should prepare for twins. The news was no great surprise. There were generations of twins in the Earley family. ‘Twins!’ Nathaniel exclaimed. ‘A pair of violinists for the Bach Double Concerto.’ Eleanor had never seen him look so happy. ‘And two more children to read their way through some of these books. Jake will never manage it alone,’ she told him. An added satisfaction was that Blanche was pregnant again too. The weeks of the second pregnancy passed slowly. Eleanor grew so large that she could hardly move. She sat in her garden through the spring and into the early summer, watching Jake play and waiting for news from Blanche, whose confinement was expected before her own. Then, early in the morning of Midsummer’s Day 1901, almost a month before she had expected it, Eleanor went into labour. The twins, a black-haired boy and girl, were born that afternoon within fifteen minutes of each other. They were small babies, but perfectly healthy. Nathaniel knelt by his wife’s bedside, crying tears of gratitude. That evening, the news reached the Woodstock Road that Blanche had given birth to a daughter. She had been born at midday, two hours before the Hirsh twins, at the Leominsters’ town house in Belgrave Square. All three deliveries had been quick and uncomplicated once again. Unlike poor Constance, the Holborough girls with their stately, ample figures were excellent breeders. Eleanor lay weakly back against her pillows, half dazed with exhaustion and relief and happiness. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, over and over again. ‘My daughter, and Blanche’s, born on the very same day.’ ‘You don’t have to believe anything,’ Nathaniel said sternly. ‘Rest is all you have to do.’ The three babies were christened together at the house in Belgrave Square. The girls were given each other’s names, as well as their aunts’ and the new Queen’s. Their mothers had no doubt that their old communion would be passed on to the new generation. Lady Grace Eleanor Alexandra Clio Stretton and Miss Clio Blanche Alexandra Grace Hirsh would share everything that their mothers had shared. Julius Edward, the real twin, was after all a boy, and boys were different. ‘They will be more than friends and more than sisters,’ Blanche said, leaning over the cradles to look at the tiny faces. ‘Twins,’ Eleanor answered, her voice full of affection. ‘Like us.’ Three (#u2bf208d7-2a0d-5ee2-b00e-16756161e98b) Clio lay on her back on her bed, her knees drawn up, following with her eyes the pattern of cracks in the ceiling. She was listening to the familiar sounds of the house, disentangling the various layers as they drifted up to her attic bedroom. Closest to hand was the sound of Julius practising. He ran up a scale and down again, up and down, the chains of notes left hanging in the air to be overtaken by their successors. Clio knew that he would be standing with his eyes shut, his face closed with concentration and his black hair falling over his forehead as the bow dipped and rose. As she listened the scale stopped and Julius launched into a piece of Bach. Clio nodded and folded her hands behind her head. From below her, in the nursery, she could hear Alice begin to cry, and then the creaking footsteps of Nanny Cooper crossing the room to pick her up, or retrieve her ball, or whatever it was that she needed. The baby Alice was only two years old, the last-born of the Hirsh children. The next-youngest, Tabitha, had been born in 1910, when the twins were already nine and Nathaniel had long given up hope of his chamber orchestra. After the twins Eleanor had suffered two miscarriages, and had been sure that there was no hope of another child. But then Tabitha had come, a big, contented baby who lay in her crib and smiled at the world, and two years later Alice arrived. Alice never seemed to sleep or to rest and she had a shrill, frequent cry, but she was also endlessly inquisitive and resourceful in comparison with her placid sister. Nathaniel loved all his children, but he knew that Alice was almost certainly the last baby and she was his adored favourite. It was Alice he looked for first, after Eleanor, when he came into the house, and he had infinite patience with her. In return Alice would do anything Nathaniel wanted her to, even go to sleep, whilst refusing the overtures of everyone else in the family. There were two younger children in the Stretton family too, Thomas and Phoebe, born four and seven years after the arrival of Grace. But all the younger children, cousins and siblings from Thomas right down to Alice, were always impatiently dismissed by the older ones as the Babies. For Jake and Julius and Clio and Grace only reckoned with themselves, or with Hugo as an occasional extra. Downstairs, Alice’s screaming stopped abruptly. Nanny must have done something to pacify her. Clio strained to discern the other more distant noises. A door opened somewhere, and Clio thought she could just catch the click click of her mother’s heels across the coloured tiles of the hall. She would be walking quickly from her drawing room to Nathaniel’s study, perhaps with an armful of flowers from the garden, or the post to put on the corner of her husband’s desk. Clio smiled. At the heart of the house there was an absence of noise, the silence of Nathaniel working. He would be sitting at his desk or in the decaying armchair beside it, his beard sunk on his chest and his reading spectacles pinching the bridge of his nose. When he took the spectacles off he would massage the reddened place where they had rested. The other noises were the ordinary sounds of the house in the Woodstock Road. The wood panelling and the floorboards creaked and protested under so many feet. The metallic rattle might be one of the two housemaids carrying an enamel jug of hot water to the nursery. The muffled thumping could be Jake descending the stairs, or Tabby banging her wooden blocks, or Mr Curler the handyman performing some repair job in the back scullery. And all these domestic sounds were wrapped in the outside whisper of the breeze in the garden trees. They made Clio feel comfortable; she had been hearing them all her life. Now she turned her head, trying to distinguish the other sound that she was waiting for. The rattle of a car drawing up in the Woodstock Road would be an intrusion, the beginning of much more serious intrusions. Everyone else in the house was waiting for the car too, but the difference was that everyone else was looking forward to its arrival. Clio sighed. The car would bring Aunt Blanche for two days, and Hugo and Grace for much longer: their summer visit to Oxford. Julius must have been listening too. He stopped playing in the middle of a bar, and it was two beats longer before Clio heard the throaty mumble of the idling engine at the kerbside. A door opened inside the house and Jake’s voice rose up the stairwell. ‘They’re here!’ Clio swung her legs over the side of her bed and stood up, smoothing the layers of her skirts. She looked at herself in the small mirror hung over her plain wooden dressing table; a long look, without a smile. Grace stood on the tiled path that led up to the front porch. She tilted her head back to gaze upwards at the Gothic windows and the pointed eaves and the absurd round turret under its witches’ hat of purple slate. Grace was smiling. She was glad to be here, she was always glad to be with her cousins. Jake ran down the steps from the front door and she held out her hands to him. He took them in his and leant closer, to kiss her cheek, as he always did. Grace slid away from him, leaving his lips pursed against the air, and she looked at him with amusement from under her eyelashes. ‘Hello Jake,’ she said, acknowledging him and demanding his acknowledgement too that she was older, prettier, more adult than she had been the last time they met, at Christmas. She had been silently practising the exact note all the way in the car. She was pleased to see that he did look again at her, with a different expression, still holding her hands. Julius came out, with Eleanor and Nathaniel behind him. Julius was as tall as Jake but thinner, and he moved more tentatively, without his brother’s good-humoured confidence. Julius kissed Grace as he had always done. Grace did not try to demonstrate any changes to Julius, nor did she know that there was no need to because he saw them at once. Julius saw everything about Grace and remembered, storing up the precious hoard of memories. Hugo had held back to help his mother down from the car. Hugo was nearly seventeen, almost grown up. He was fair like his father, even his colouring setting him apart from the others. Hugo shook hands heartily and automatically; Julius had once said that it made him feel like one of the Stretton tenants. The sisters had kissed and Nathaniel had embraced Blanche before Clio appeared in the doorway. She came slowly down the stairs, listening to the confusion of greetings, and stood at the top of the front steps looking down. She saw that Grace’s navy-blue tucked linen dress was crisp, and that her own was creased from rolling on the bed. She also saw that Grace had done her hair differently, drawing it back over her ears to show more of her face. ‘Clio, oh Clio, I’m so happy to see you.’ Grace ran up the stone steps and flung her arms around her cousin. She hugged her, almost swinging her off her feet in her exuberance. At once Clio felt pleased and flattered and ashamed of her own reluctance. It was impossible not to love Grace for her warmth and enthusiasm and all the life in her. Clio hugged her back, murmuring that she was happy too. She was only thinking that Jake and Julius loved Grace, of course they would do, but that in return she behaved as if they were hers, by some seigneurial right. They are not hers, Clio reiterated. She was fiercely proud of her brothers, and the pride was coupled with possessiveness. ‘You can have no idea how boring it has been at Stretton all these months,’ Grace was saying. ‘How much I have longed for company, died to be with you all. I would look out of the windows at the trees and grass and emptiness and moan with misery.’ ‘What nonsense you talk, Grace,’ Hugo said briskly. ‘How would you know about misery, or ecstasy, Hugo, for that matter? When you are only concerned with cricket?’ Grace linked her arms through Jake’s and Julius’s and drew them up into the house with her. Clio followed thoughtfully behind, leaving Hugo to accompany the parents into the drawing room. The four of them climbed to the playroom, their old headquarters near the top of the house. Over the years they had played and plotted across the worn carpets and horsehair sofas, and the scuffed tables and bulging cupboards showed the scars of imaginary battles and voyages. The room was so familiar to them all that none of them even glanced around. Jake dropped at full length on to one of the sofas, letting one long leg swing over the arm. Clio and Julius sat on the club fender, one on either side of the empty grate. They were alike, with the same narrow faces and the same peak of hair springing from their foreheads, but the family resemblance was just as strong between Clio and Grace. Grace stood in the middle of the room, with their eyes on her. ‘Now, tell me the news,’ she insisted. ‘All the news.’ ‘Jake is going to be house captain next term,’ Clio said proudly. Jake and Julius were boarders at a school near Reading. Clio attended a girls’ day school in Oxford. Only Grace was being educated at home, by a governess, just as her mother and aunt had been at Holborough. She was quick-witted and had an excellent memory, but she guessed that she was not academically clever like her Hirsh cousins. She also knew that by comparison with them she was under-educated; Nathaniel was a great believer in the power of learning, whereas John Leominster considered it quite good enough just to be born a Stretton, especially for a mere girl. The Woodstock Road house had always been full of books and atlases and globes of the night sky, taken for granted by the Hirsh children. Grace had concealed her ignorance by always trying to take the lead, directing the talk or the game on to ground that was safe for her. She preferred Kim’s Game to quizzes, fantasy to fact. She looked down at Jake now. ‘Isn’t that rather Culmington?’ she demanded. Grace had coined the term from Hugo’s title. In the beginning they had used it to describe the qualities stoutly advocated by Hugo himself: decency and fairness and a willingness to play the game by the rules. There was no malice against Hugo in it, it was simply that the circle considered themselves more imaginative and less conventional than the Viscount. By extension the term had come to refer to doing the right thing, public spirit, duty and virtue. To dullness. Jake waved languidly. ‘One has to accept these tasks.’ He said to Clio, ‘Grace didn’t mean that kind of news.’ He knew that Grace was asking him to offer his equivalent of what now seemed so obvious and intriguing about her, evidence that he had grown up. ‘What kind, then?’ Clio demanded. Grace began to walk to the window, measuring her steps. ‘News of life. Love.’ ‘Love?’ Julius sniggered; reached across the gap of the fender to nudge Clio. Julius was still a boy, only thirteen. Grace’s eyes met Jake’s, and they smiled. Watching, Clio knew that her cousin had created a pair with Jake, and that she and Julius were excluded. At the window Grace spread her hands on the sill and looked down into the road. There was a grocer’s delivery cart clopping by, her mother’s car with the chauffeur polishing its gleaming nose, almost no one else to be seen. Oxford was asleep in the depths of the Long Vacation. But after Stretton the Woodstock Road looked as busy as Piccadilly. ‘What shall we do?’ she asked. ‘You choose. It’s your first afternoon,’ Julius said politely, wanting to cover up his lapse. ‘Pitt-Rivers, then,’ Grace answered. They left the playroom and chased down the stairs, as if they were children after all. Blanche and Eleanor were drinking tea together. Hugo had gone out, announcing that he wanted to look around the place. The next year at Eton would be his last and he planned to go up to Christ Church. His attitude to Oxford was already calmly proprietary. The other children laughed at this embodiment of Culmington. They met Nathaniel at the bottom of the stairs. He had shrugged himself into his light summer coat, and carried his panama hat in one hand and a leather bag full of papers in the other. ‘We’re going to Pitt-Rivers, Grace has chosen. Where are you going, Pappy?’ ‘Into College, just for an hour. If you would like, I will meet you at Pitt-Rivers and we can walk in the Parks.’ ‘Yes, yes we can do that. Only don’t forget about us as soon as you get to College and sit there for hours and hours, will you?’ ‘I’ll try not to,’ Nathaniel said, not denying the possibility. They left the house and walked towards the city, through the patches of shade cast by the big trees lining the road and out into the sunshine again. Nathaniel walked quickly, taking long strides, but the children easily kept pace with him. When they came to the red-and-yellow bulk of Keble, with its chapel looking – as Clio always said – like some animal on its back with its legs in the air, they turned into Parks Road and Nathaniel left them. The Pitt-Rivers loomed across the road. They hurried over to the arched entrance and the yawning attendant in his booth nodded them in. They passed through the door and into the museum. The smell descended around them. It was compounded of dust, formaldehyde, and the exudations of rumbling hot-water pipes, animal skins and bones, and mice. The air was thick from being long enclosed, and the dim light hardly illuminated the exhibits in their glass cases. The silence was sepulchral. The cousins breathed in; looked up into the wooden galleries rising above their heads where the occasional shuffling don might be glimpsed, and fanned out ready to make their tour of inspection. They had been visiting the museum ever since they were old enough for Nathaniel to bring them, on wet winter afternoons when their woollen hats and mufflers steamed gently and added to the miasma. It had been an outing, a place where Nathaniel told stories sparked off by the sight of a gruesome shrunken head or a decorated shield, a mysterious treasure cave remote from the humdrum Oxford, and for Grace a source of information that she secretly gathered to herself. Grace knew about the earth’s mineral deposits because she had learnt the display labels beside the glittering chunks of quartz and mica and haematite. Later, when they were a little older, Pitt-Rivers had become a place of refuge away from the house. No one ever objected to their making the short walk to the museum. They had drifted between the tall cabinets, peering in at the jumble of trophies within and then at their own reflections in the murky glass, waiting for something to happen. Each of them had their favourite exhibits and they visited them in ritual order, jealously checking to make sure that each item of the display was intact. Jake liked the Mammals, a small collection of stuffed arctic foxes and ermines and skunks with mothy hides and bright glass eyes, their stiff legs and yellow claws resting on wooden plaques garnished with little fragments of tundra. Julius preferred the Story of Man, a Darwinian series of tableaux culminating in Modern Man, a wax dummy complete with bowler hat and starched collar. Clio headed for the Dinosaurs, peering upwards through the ark of a rebuilt rib-cage and sighing over the great empty skulls. Grace’s favourite was Geology, considered very dry by the others. She could stand for hours looking at the black slabs stained with ochre iron, at polished golden whorls and salty crystals, and at an egg of grey rock split to reveal the lavender sparkle of raw amethyst. She found that her rocks were all in their places, the labels beside them only a little yellower and the spidery handwriting fading into paler sepia. She rested her forehead against the glass, transfixed by the mathematical purity of hexagonal prisms of quartz. She was thinking that her mother’s diamonds came from the same source, from rocks like these chipped out of the deep ground somewhere. Grace liked the diamonds although they would be worn by Hugo’s wife, not her, but she preferred these other crystals still half embedded in their native rock. They gave her a vertiginous sense of the earth’s prodigality, her own smallness in comparison. She was still leaning her head against the case when Jake came up behind her. He stood at her shoulder, looking down at the eternal display of stones. Then he shifted his gaze to Grace’s hair, a thick ringlet of it lying over her shoulder, and the lines of her cheek and jaw. He saw that her breath made a faint mist on the glass. He reached up with his finger and touched the haze, and it seemed such an intimate part of Grace herself that the blood suddenly hammered in his ears and he opened his mouth to suck in the thinned air. With the tip of his finger in the mist Jake traced the letter G. Grace turned to look at him then with colour in her face that he had never seen before. Jake felt as if a fist had struck him in the chest, but he looked steadily back at her. He saw the faint bronze flecks in the brown of her eyes. Something had happened, at last. Then they heard Clio calling them in the sibilant whisper that stood for a proper shout in the vaults of Pitt-Rivers. ‘Grace, Jake? Where are you? We’ve been here for an hour. Pappy will be waiting.’ ‘We had better go,’ Grace said. Jake stumbled after her, blinking, out into the July sunshine. Nathaniel was sitting on a low wall reading a newspaper. His panama hat was tipped forward to shield his eyes from the sun and his leather bag stood unregarded at his feet. They called to him, ‘Pappy, Uncle Nathaniel, we’re sorry to keep you waiting, don’t be vexed …’ Nathaniel did not look up. He was reading intently, his thick eyebrows drawn together and the corners of his mouth turned down in the springy mass of his beard. ‘Pappy …’ He did look up then. He was still frowning but he folded the newspaper carefully into its creases, smaller and smaller still, and poked it away out of sight between the books and papers in his bag. ‘Here you all are,’ he said, tipping his hat back as if he was glad of the distraction they provided. His frown disappeared a moment later and he stood up, swinging the bag over his shoulder by its leather strap and holding out his other arm to Grace. ‘Is everyone ready? Then off we go.’ They turned through the big iron gates into the University Parks. There was a vista of heavy-headed trees and smooth grass, and flowerbeds subsiding into high-summer exhaustion. The scent of mown lawns was welcome after the thick atmosphere of the museum. ‘We should have called in for Tabby and Alice,’ Nathaniel said. He enjoyed having all his children around him. ‘They love the Parks.’ ‘No, not the Babies,’ the older ones groaned. Grace walked with her arm in Nathaniel’s, chattering to him. Clio and Julius and Jake walked close behind, following their shadows over the grass. Jake felt as if his eyes and ears had been suddenly opened. The colours were almost painfully vivid, and he could hear bees humming, even the splash of the river over the rollers beyond Parsons’ Pleasure. He struggled to listen to what the twins were saying, and to frame ordinary responses. They came to the river rippling under a high arched footbridge. Clio and Julius ran up the steep slope of the bridge and hung over the metal railing to peer into the depths. When they were small they had dropped stones, and twigs to race in the winter currents. Today the river was sluggish, deep green in the shade of the willows. Jake caught the whiff of mud and weed. Nathaniel said, ‘If you would like to walk up to the boathouse, we could take out a punt.’ Clio and Jake were enthusiastic. Punting was always popular with the Hirshes, and on a hot afternoon it was pleasant to lie back on cushions and glide over the water. Only Grace said nothing, and Julius was quiet too, observing her. Nathaniel led the way along the river path under the branches of the willows, to the point where the punts were tied up. The boatman scrambled across the raft of them, setting the boats rocking and the water slapping against the flat bottoms. Feather pillows were handed into one of the boats, and Nathaniel selected a hooked pole, weighing it critically in one hand. Grace stood on the sloping jetty, watching Clio sit down and spread her skirts. She wanted to step in too, but she couldn’t move. The sight of the rocking boat and the sound of slapping water froze her, as they had done ever since the Mabel. Grace hated to be afraid, but she couldn’t conquer this fear. She recoiled from the innocent river as if it might flow up the jetty and engulf her. Julius and Jake hesitated beside her. Julius knew what held her back, because his senses were highly developed where Grace was concerned. Jake was looking at her curiously. ‘I think, Uncle Nathaniel, I would rather walk on the bank today. If you don’t mind, of course?’ Grace’s voice was clear and steady. Nathaniel saw what was the matter, and blamed himself for his insensitivity. ‘Walk by all means, Grace. We will keep pace with you.’ ‘Don’t hold back on purpose. Perhaps Jake will walk too, to keep me company?’ ‘Good idea. Thank you, Jake,’ Nathaniel said. Julius scrambled into the punt after Clio, without looking round. The twins sat facing each other amongst the piled cushions and Nathaniel stationed himself at the back. He dropped the pole into the water, pushed, and twisted it to lift it free. The punt shot forward and drops of spray scattered concentric circles in its wake. Grace and Jake began to walk, side by side. Jake could think of nothing to say, now he had the unthinkable chance of being alone with her, out of earshot of noisy siblings and all the busy demands of the Woodstock Road. He wanted to say everything, to pour out his astonishment that Grace, who was only his cousin and ally, had suddenly turned into an intriguing mystery. He wanted to ask her if she felt the same, to compare and confide, to draw her closer, this unknown Grace. The clumsy words jammed in his head. He could only manage, thickly, ‘It’s all different, all of a sudden. It is, isn’t it?’ Grace seemed calm, as if she understood everything. She nodded her head once, very slowly, ‘Yes. Everything is different.’ ‘You’re not just Grace any longer.’ ‘Nor are you just Jake.’ Her voice was very low, almost inaudible. Jake could hardly breathe. So Grace felt it too, then, this naked and painful awareness? The intimacy of it was terrifying, and intoxicating. They were walking very close together. Their arms almost brushed, and then Jake’s fingers hanging loosely at his side touched the tips of Grace’s. A current shot up his arm. Their hands groped, in the folds of Grace’s blue skirt, and then clasped together. They walked on, linked together, staring straight ahead of them at Nathaniel’s back as he bent and straightened to the pole. Clio sat facing them, her expression unreadable at this distance. It was like holding Clio’s hand, Jake thought. This hand was the same shape as Clio’s, there was the same warmth in the palm of it. But there was the sudden, startling difference. Bewildered, Jake tried to work out what he did feel. He wanted to take Grace and hold her against the ribbed trunk of one of the trees; he wanted to rub his face against her and push his hands into the blue dress. He felt like an animal, like one of the museum’s Mammals in rut, in the grip of terrible instincts. He was disgusted, and ashamed, and confused by what had been set off within him. He believed that what he was thinking about Grace was almost as bad as thinking it about Clio. Jake’s skin burned and his vision blurred, but he went on walking stiffly, staring ahead of him, all the heat of him concentrated in the palm of his hand. Grace was silent too. She was thinking, If he tries to kiss me, what will I do? She wanted him to kiss her, she wanted him to admit, although she couldn’t even have defined what the admission would be. She knew that she had suddenly acquired some power, but now she had sensed it she was afraid of using it. She thought, I’ll let him, and then I’ll break away from him and run. I’ll know he loves me, he’ll be mine then … Jake didn’t try to kiss her. He walked on, miserably, his eyes fixed on Clio and Nathaniel and Julius on the river, but he held on to Grace’s hand as if he would never let go. At last they saw Nathaniel draw the pole in a wide arc from the stern of the punt. The long nose swung across the river until it pointed back towards them. It was time to head home again. Jake and Grace jumped guiltily apart. They stood awkwardly until the punt drew level and Clio’s accusing eyes settled on them. ‘Are you enjoying the walk?’ Nathaniel boomed. ‘Yes, thank you,’ Grace said. They turned together and began to follow the punt once more. Instead of all the things he wanted to say and couldn’t, and all the banalities he might have settled for instead, Jake blurted out, ‘Are you afraid of boats?’ It was the first time since the Mabel summer that Grace had been obliged directly to refuse to go out on to the water. Usually, with some ingenuity, she was able to evade the possibility well in advance. Now she thought how inadequate Jake’s words were. ‘Afraid of boats’ took no account of the nights when she bit the insides of her mouth to stop herself falling asleep, so the dreams couldn’t come, nor of the waking cold terror of the sound of the waves, of the simple smell of salt water. She said, ‘I think you might be too, if you had almost drowned.’ ‘Why didn’t any of us know? Haven’t you told anyone?’ Grace considered. ‘I think Julius guessed.’ Jake didn’t want to hear about Julius now. Grace went on, ‘I haven’t told anyone. Only you.’ Jake gave her such a look of happiness and gratitude for singling him out that Grace forgot her humiliation over the punt. ‘You mustn’t worry about it, Grace, I’ll look after you, there’s no need to be afraid of anything.’ She smiled, looking up at him, tasting some of the satisfaction of power. ‘Thank you, Jake,’ she whispered. He was her admired cousin, their long-time ringleader, and she wanted his allegiance to her alone, that was the admission. And it came to her that although Jake was sixteen and clever and she was three whole years younger and had been taught nothing, she still knew more than he did. Behind the folds of her skirt she reached her hand to touch his again, and he took hold of it as though it were the Grail itself. The twins and Nathaniel were waiting at the jetty. Julius looked from one of them to the other, with resignation. Clio stared straight ahead, and even in his confusion, Jake saw that she was jealous. He took care to walk beside her on the way home. Only Nathaniel seemed oblivious to what had been happening. He had taken the newspaper out of his bag again and he beat the rolled-up tube of it against his leg as he strode along. When they came home, Eleanor was waiting for Nathaniel. ‘Oswald Harris is here,’ she said. ‘In your study.’ Dr Harris was one of Nathaniel’s colleagues, a specialist in Romance languages and an old family friend. He was a particular favourite of the Hirsh children, and Clio’s face brightened at the mention of his name. ‘Oh good. Will he play something with us?’ ‘Not now, Clio,’ Nathaniel said abruptly. ‘Off you go, all of you.’ He went into the study, and they saw Dr Harris jump up to greet him without his usual smile. Eleanor and Blanche were left in the hallway, their clothes dappled with coloured light from the stained-glass panels in the front door. Afterwards the cousins recalled that evening at the end of July as the first time they heard adult talk of Serbia and Austria, and the first time they overheard the murmured word crisis. They paid little attention to it, then. That year Hugo and Jake were considered old enough to join their parents for dinner, but the twins and Grace still had to sit down with the Babies for nursery supper. Jake was hanging up his jacket in the boot room and Nanny Cooper was already calling the rest of the children to the table when Grace appeared in the doorway. The boot room was a place of discarded galoshes and fraying straw hats and croquet mallets, and she looked around it with a brilliant smile. ‘You’re here,’ she whispered. Her eyes were shining. She closed the door silently, and came straight to him. She put her hands on his forearms, and then she reached up and kissed him on the mouth. It was a long kiss, soft-lipped and tasting of strawberries. Jake almost fainted. When she drew back he croaked, ‘Grace, come here again, please …’ but she was already at the doorway, easing open the door and checking the corridor beyond. Her lips looked very red, and her smile dazzled him. ‘If I don’t go, Nanny will be down here to find me. But this is a good place, isn’t it? We can meet here again. There’s all the summer, Jake.’ Then she disappeared. Dinner was interminable. All Jake wanted was to escape to his bed, to think in privacy and silence, but the adults and Hugo seemed disposed to sit with grave faces and talk all night. ‘It must come,’ Dr Harris judged. ‘I cannot see how it can be avoided now that Germany and France have mobilized.’ ‘There must not be a war. Think of our poor boys,’ Blanche whispered. ‘If it does come, and I agree with Dr Harris that it must,’ Hugo intoned, ‘then I shall enlist at once. It will be over by Christmas, and I don’t want to miss it.’ ‘Hugo, you can’t possibly. You are only sixteen years old.’ ‘Almost seventeen, Mama, quite old enough. What do you say, Jake?’ Jake was startled out of his own thoughts, and unreasonably irritated that international events should disturb him now, when there were other things to consider. When there was Grace, with her strawberry mouth … ‘Jake, are you all right?’ Nathaniel asked. He said stiffly, ‘Perfectly. I don’t believe there should be a war. I don’t believe that men should go out and kill each other over an Archduke or Serbian sovereignty or anything else. There should be some other way, some civilized way. Men should be able to demonstrate that they have higher instincts than animals fighting over their territory.’ He was reminded of the Mammals, and the Pitt-Rivers, and Grace’s breath clouding the glass of the display case. He was made even angrier by the realization that his face and neck were crimson, and that Hugo was eyeing him with superior amusement. Nathaniel said gently, ‘I think you are right, Jake. But I do not believe that very many people share our views.’ At last the evening was over. Jake escaped to his bed, but there was no refuge in sleep. He lay in the darkness, rigid and sweating, envying Julius’s oblivious even breaths from the opposite bed. He could only think of Grace lying in her own bed, in her white nightgown with her hair streaming out over the pillow, just a few yards away. She is your cousin, he told himself hopelessly. Almost your sister. But she had come to seek him out in the boot room, and there had been that precious, inflammatory kiss … Jake groaned in his misery and rolled over on to his stomach. He did not touch himself, although he knew that there were men who did, plenty of them at school. But they had been issued with severe warnings, some more explicit than others, and Jake had been disposed to believe them. The pressure of the mattress made it worse. He rolled over again and pushed off the blankets so that he only felt the touch of the night air. It was already light when Jake finally fell asleep. On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia and the first shots of the European conflict were fired. John Leominster came from London to fetch Blanche. As always when his brother-in-law was at hand, Nathaniel became noticeably more beetle-browed and clever and Germanic. After so many years of marriage the sisters had become adept at defusing the tension between their husbands with inconsequential talk, but on this sombre evening the only real topic was the likelihood of Britain entering the war. After the long-drawn-out family dinner Jake wandered away, but Hugo and John retired with Nathaniel to his study. Nathaniel poured whisky and soda, diluting Hugo’s until it was almost colourless and Hugo blinked in protest. ‘This can’t be easy for you, Hirsh,’ John said. ‘It isn’t easy for any of us. War does not have the reputation of ease.’ ‘I meant for you in particular, with your, ah, antecedents.’ John Leominster knew quite well that Levi and Dora Hirsh had settled in Manchester from Bremen in the mid 1860s. Levi was a scientist, an industrial chemist, and he had prospered with England’s manufacturing prosperity. Levi and Dora had family spread across most of Europe, but after fifty years they would not have considered themselves anything but English. ‘My antecedents? I was born here, Leominster. I am as British as you are, my dear fellow.’ It was a favourite tease of Nathaniel’s. Leominster could trace his descent from Henry VII and his pale face darkened with annoyance now. ‘Not quite, but let us not argue about it.’ ‘By all means not. More whisky, old chap?’ Hugo held up his glass too. ‘What do you think will happen, uncle?’ Nathaniel sighed, relinquishing the pleasure of baiting Leominster. ‘I think Britain will be at war with Germany in a matter of days. I feel great sadness for Germany and the German people, and for all of Europe. I feel the most sorrow for Jake, and you, even Julius. It will not be a short war, Hugo. You need not be afraid that you will miss it.’ ‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I shall join just as soon as I can, in any case.’ John put down his glass. ‘You may enlist when you are eighteen, Hugo, not before. I shall be proud to send you off then.’ Hugo asked eagerly, ‘And Jake? Jake is only seven months younger than I am.’ ‘Jake must speak for himself, Hugo. But I understand that he feels as I do, that it should not be necessary for civilized peoples to kill and maim one another’s young men, and to leave a whole generation lying bleeding on some battlefield. I do not believe that Jake will want to go and slaughter his German cousins, and I am ashamed of the politicians and the leaders who will oblige him to make such a decision. I pray that he will have the courage to do what he believes is right, and I am sure he will find a way to be of service to our country.’ Nathaniel stood up, slowly, as if he was tired, and replaced the whisky decanter on the tray on his desk. The top of the desk was a drift of papers covered with his tiny handwriting, and he seemed to gaze longingly at it. The Lords Leominster and Culmington exchanged glances. ‘And to show the damned Kaiser that Britain means business,’ Leominster muttered. Nathaniel was still looking at his papers. There was the ordered world of scholarship, beckoning him. He put his hand up to rub his beard around his mouth where grey fronds were beginning to show amongst the wiry black. ‘If you wish,’ Nathaniel said absently. ‘Where is Jake?’ Hugo demanded. ‘I don’t know. I think Jake has problems of his own, just at present.’ Jake was standing at the upstairs landing window, looking down from one of the unpredictable angles of the house to the Woodstock Road below. A gas lamp on top of a tall iron post beyond the gate threw light on the evergreen shrubs beside the gate and tipped the points of the iron railings that bounded the front garden. A cyclist swooped silently past, and for an instant the street lamp laid a monster’s wavering shadow on the road before him. Jake was not thinking about the war, or reflecting on duty and service to his country. He was wondering what his cousin Hugo did in circumstances like his own. Hugo was fond of hinting that he was a man of the world, but Jake couldn’t work out what that meant. He didn’t know either whether it was more Culmington nobly to resist temptation and think pure thoughts, or not to think at all and so avoid anxiety, as well as shame and guilt. Jake was not sure that there was any way of asking Hugo. It was soothing to be alone in the dark, at least. He had been with Grace for most of the day, but he had never been alone with her for a second. Clio was always there, however mutely Jake willed her to take herself off. And Julius too; Julius had stayed close to them, seeing everything and saying nothing. For the first time, there was a break in the magic circle. Jake sighed. There had been no chance to exchange a private word with Grace, let alone another kiss, a caress. They had contented themselves with looks. And he had seen that Grace looked happy, with rosier cheeks and brighter eyes than when she had arrived. Perhaps that was enough, Jake thought. With the tender new concern he felt for her he wanted Grace to be happy as much as he wanted his own happiness. But his own happiness, or satisfaction at least, seemed to depend on the unthinkable. He remembered the boot room again, and the smell of galoshes and waterproofs and the taste of Grace. It was better that she should be happy, he told himself, and that he should suffer. It was the only solution, Culmington or otherwise. Eleanor came up the stairs on her way to bed and saw Jake silhouetted at the window. He did not hear her approach and he jumped violently when she spoke. ‘Jakie, what is it? Is it the war?’ ‘Yes,’ Jake lied. ‘The war.’ Even in his mother’s face he saw the shape of Grace’s features. Eleanor and Blanche and Clio. Sisters, family. And yet. ‘I was proud of what you said,’ Eleanor told him. Jake found that he could barely remember what it was he had said. Some pompous diatribe about man’s higher instincts. Upon which, he thought, he was hardly in a position to pronounce. ‘But you are only sixteen. You are only a boy, Jake. Going to fight is for men, and so is taking the decision not to fight.’ Jake mumbled, ‘I know. I’m quite all right. I’m not worried about it.’ Eleanor put her hand up to his face. Jake stood a head taller than her; she wondered exactly when it was that this unfathomable man had emerged from the soft pupa of her child. He suffered her caress stiffly. ‘Go to bed now,’ Eleanor sighed. Jake went obediently, and lay thinking about Grace. By August 4, Britain was at war with Germany. News came of crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, cheering and singing the national anthem. Hugo pored over the newspapers that carried pictures of young men flocking to recruiting offices. He ached with impatience to join them, and sighed over his misfortune in being just too young. The prospect of having to return to school for the next half while other men marched to glory filled him with despair. It was odd to find that outwardly, visibly, nothing changed. The cousins discovered that Oxford looked exactly as it always did in the middle of the Long Vacation. The High was deserted except for plodding dons and dons’ wives shopping, and only the windows of the mens’ outfitters replaced their displays of academic robes and College ties with military tunics and officers’ caps. North Oxford drowsed beneath its canopies of trees, and there was the summer round of tennis parties and picnics and croquet games, no different from any other year. Jake bore the sociable routine half impatiently and half gladly because it occupied the four of them and allowed him to be harmlessly near to Grace. Grace was very lively. Her vivacity made Clio look like her smaller shadow. There were no more meetings in the boot room, because Grace did not look for the opportunities. Jake realized that he was shadowing her like a patient dog, hoping for a scrap of intimacy. She rewarded him with private smiles, and with the touch of her hand sometimes, when no one else was looking. He was tormented by the inadequacy of their contacts, and at the same time relieved that he did not have to control himself as he would if they were to find themselves alone. The long days of August passed quickly, even for Hugo in the agony of his inactivity. At the end of the month there was a picnic beside the river at Iffley, when the Hirshes and their cousins were joined by Dr Harris and his wife and small children. Nathaniel and Oswald Harris spread rugs and a white linen cloth in the shade of the trees, and Eleanor and Mary Harris unpacked wicker baskets and spooned raspberries into glass dishes. The small children ran and fell over in the grass, and Hugo and Jake and Julius swam in the river. Their shouts and splashings were swallowed prematurely by the still, heavy air. Nathaniel predicted that the day would end with a thunderstorm. Clio and Grace, in white dresses and straw sunhats, walked arm in arm along the footpath. Grace unravelled coarse strands of goose-grass from the hedge and twisted them into sticky garlands for their straw hats. ‘You look like a girl in a painting,’ she told Clio. ‘Raspberry juice on your chin and leaves in your hair. It ought to be red wine, and vine leaves, and you could pose for Bacchus. He is the god of wine, isn’t he?’ ‘Revelry, as well. He’s Dionysus in Greek. Painters give him crowns of grapes and vine leaves, yes.’ When she had delivered her speech Clio regretted her pedantry, but Grace seemed as always to be glad of the information. ‘Mmm, you’ll do for him, then. What shall I be?’ ‘Helen of Troy,’ Clio said. She would have gone on to make some wry observation on the distinction between her brother and Paris, but Grace good-humouredly interrupted her. Grace didn’t seem to know anything about Helen of Troy. ‘Listen, Dr Harris is calling. They must want us for something.’ She held out her arm again and Clio took it. There was no sense in being resentful of Grace. Grace herself did not harbour resentment. But then, Clio reflected, she had no reason to. Oswald Harris was directing preparations for a wide game. He waved his arms in excitable sweeps, ordering children in different directions. Hugo forgot his dignity and ran with Julius and Clio and the Harris children. ‘You are the quarry,’ Dr Harris called after them. ‘Run, now.’ He turned back to the depleted circle gathered around the remains of the picnic. ‘Jake and Grace, you are the hunters. Give them five minutes exactly.’ They waited, not looking at each other, paying exaggerated attention to counting the seconds. Eleanor and Mary Harris leant against the trunk of an elm tree, talking in low voices. A little distance away Nathaniel lay on the rug, propped on one elbow. Tabby had fallen asleep beside him, and he had placed his old panama hat to shade her head. He was watching Alice who made little lunging rushes to and fro through the tufts of tall grass. He saw her tilt her head backwards to follow the flight of a white butterfly, and as it rose she leant too far backwards and overbalanced. She lay on her back, staring at the sky from under the brim of her cotton sunbonnet. The butterfly still hovered above her, and in her fascination she forgot to cry. Nathaniel saw the wide meadow dotted with sheaves of corn, and the willows on the opposite bank of the river, and Jake vaulting the gate into the next field before opening it to let Grace through. He heard the women murmuring, and the creak and splash of a skiff on the river, and one of the Harris children, a long way off, calling a taunt to the hunters. Along the borders of Eastern Prussia, the Russian soldiers of General Samsonov’s Second Army were being cut down by German shellfire. With the sun hot on his bare head and the afternoon’s warmth beginning to build into oppressive stillness, Nathaniel imagined the thunder of the guns, and the stench of burning, and sudden death. The same world contained these two realities: the picnic and the battlefield, and Nathaniel knew that the threads that bound them together were tightening, drawing them closer every day. At home in London the exhibition hall at Olympia had been converted into a camp for aliens. Hundreds of Germans living in England had been rounded up and imprisoned there, and many more had suffered the ransacking of their homes on suspicion of being enemy spies. Only two days earlier, a policeman had come to visit Nathaniel. He had left his bicycle leaning against the stone steps leading up to the front door in the Woodstock Road, and when the outraged housemaid had shown him into Nathaniel’s study he had stood awkwardly on the threshold, turning his helmet over and over in his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Professor Hirsh,’ he kept saying. ‘What do you want to do?’ Nathaniel asked him. ‘Search this room for coded messages to General von Hindenburg? Arrest me for treason?’ The conversations he had had with John Leominster seemed prophetic now, not comical at all. ‘Of course not, sir,’ the man said miserably. ‘It’s a matter of formality. It’s this DORA, isn’t it?’ Nathaniel wondered what else the powers of the Defence of the Realm Act might bring, and what his children would have to suffer for bearing a name that he was proud of. In the sunny meadow he scrambled to his feet and ran to where Alice lay on the grass. He scooped her up and touched his lips to the warm baby flesh at the back of her neck. ‘I love you,’ he murmured to her. ‘Ich liebe dich.’ Jake and Grace stood face to face in an angle of the hedge, hidden from the world by a green buttress of hawthorn branches. ‘I love you,’ Jake said hotly. The taunting calls of their hidden quarry filled the heavy air like the cries of birds. Jake didn’t care about anything except Grace, and the dampness of her skin under the weight of her hair, and the pulse of her throat just above the white collar of her dress. He fixed his eyes on the fluttering beat of it. ‘Jake …’ She touched his face, and then his black hair, still slick and wet with river water. The gesture reminded him of his mother’s and he snatched her wrist and held it. ‘Don’t say anything,’ he begged her. ‘Just be here. Just like this …’ He put his hands around her waist. It was narrow, the fragility of her body surprised and stirred him. He could feel the curve of her ribs, and the soft small swellings above. His hands rested there, he didn’t dare to move them, and he was afraid that his knees would give way beneath him. Jake bent his head, darkening her face with his own shadow. He touched her mouth with his own and his tongue found her teeth like a barrier, and then she opened her mouth and it was hotter and wetter than his own. He kissed her, drinking her in as if he had been dying of thirst. Her head fell back, baring her throat, and her straw hat with its wilting Dionysian garland dropped off and lay at their feet. Grace almost toppled under his leaning weight but he caught her, and they half fell and half lay down in the grass under their hawthorn hedge. Jake pressed himself on top of her, and his hands found the hem of her white dress, and the folds of her petticoat, all the mysterious layers of feminine apparel, and then the little mound between her legs, tight and innocent like the smooth rump of a small animal. ‘Jake, Jake,’ Grace was almost screaming. For an instant she was stronger than he was. She pushed him aside and scrambled up, snatching her crushed hat from beneath him. There was grass caught in her hair and in the tucks of her dress. She crammed her hat on her tumbled hair and ran away, towards the voices, her own cry rising to theirs, ‘Coming to find you. Coming to find you.’ Jake rolled on to his side and lay staring through the stalks of grass, reduced to the same level as the insects that crossed his limited field of vision. The grass was damp against his cheek, but he was sticky with heat and he found that he was panting for breath. He lay still until his breathing steadied again, watching the miniature world inches from his face. The voices were a long way off now; he knew that he was alone. Grace had run away from him, and a kind of carelessness replaced his anxiety. He found that he didn’t mind that she was gone, that he was even relieved. Dreamily, still watching the waving blades of grass, Jake undid his clothes. It felt indecent to be exposed in the open air, in daylight, but the air was deliciously cool. He stretched out, flattening himself against the earth, his thoughts stilled. He closed his fingers around himself, tentatively at first, and then with a firmer grasp. After a month, a long month of suppressing himself, it did not take much. He was not thinking of Grace, or of anything at all except obeying his instincts. The pleasure of the orgasm raced all through his body, wave after wave, but the satisfaction and relief that followed it was better. It was like a blessing. His limbs felt heavy and soft, like a baby’s, and he curled on his side listening to the empty air. Jake opened his eyes again on the grass world, and then on the sky over his head. Heavy, piled clouds had rolled over the sun, but the margins of them were still rimmed with gold. He smiled, and raised himself on one elbow, then sat up and spread his arms until the joints cracked. He saw that there were pearly drops on the grass where he had been lying, bending the blades of grass. They didn’t look ugly, or unnatural, or in any way unclean. They seemed shiny and quite innocent. Jake waited for the waves of guilt to come, echoing the pleasure, but nothing did. He only felt calm, and comfortable. He stood up then, buttoning his trousers up. Then he bent down and tore some handfuls of the long grass, and dropped them over the evidence of himself in the sheltered angle of the hawthorn hedge. He felt light and springy, full of energy. He had done nothing wrong, it occurred to him. He was right, and all the murky advice and warnings he had been given were wrong. He lifted his head and called loudly, ‘Coming to find you.’ Nathaniel had been right about the thunderstorm. It broke in the early evening, sending Tabby and the housemaids scuttling to Nanny in the nursery and making Alice break out in wails of uncomprehending protest. Clio and Grace sat in their bedroom while the rain drummed on the roof and bounced in fat drops off the streaming Woodstock Road. Grace was humming and brushing Clio’s hair, long rhythmic strokes that made it spark and crackle. In his room, Julius was practising the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Clio loved the music but Julius kept breaking off in the same bar, repeating a handful of phrases with his perfectionist’s concentration. ‘Your hair is prettier than mine,’ Grace said, breaking off from her humming. ‘It’s silkier. I’ll give it one hundred more brushes, and it will shine.’ Clio sighed languorously. She felt happier this evening than she had done since the beginning of the holiday. Jake and Grace had appeared separately during the game; they could have been together but she was sure they had not. Jake had looked ordinary, too, instead of always covertly peering at Grace and then glancing hastily away in case anyone noticed him doing it. Grace herself had been friendly, perhaps a little quieter than usual. Clio thought that the atmosphere between them all was as it used to be, except that Julius watched what went on and said nothing. The intimacy created by the storm and the hairbrushing and Grace’s humming made Clio feel bold, and she said, ‘I think it’s stupid, all the boy and girl business. Like you and Jake sighing and staring at each other. It spoils everything.’ There were two or three more brush strokes, and silence, while Grace seemed to consider. Then she laughed, putting the hairbrush down and leaning over Clio’s shoulder so that she could see their twin reflections in the mirror. ‘Do you know what? I think you’re right. It does spoil everything.’ In a month, since the Pitt-Rivers day, she had seen Jake change from the admirable leader and innovator she had hero-worshipped almost from babyhood into a duller, slower twin of himself. Jake blushed now, and hovered awkwardly, and tried to catch her in corners. She wanted to be admired and singled out and even kissed, but by the old glamorous Jake, not the new hesitant one. And then today, when he did catch her, he hadn’t acted as he was supposed to act. Grace wasn’t exactly sure how that was, except to do homage to her in some way, perhaps kneeling down, perhaps eloquently declaring that he would love her for ever, would go to the war and fight and die for her sake. Instead he had frightened her, and she had frightened herself. She wasn’t supposed to feel like that, when he touched her there, was she? She had run away, run in real terror, back to the other children and the rules of the game. It was cosy in Clio’s bedroom with the two white beds turned down and the night-light burning on the table between them. Clio would turn it out when they went to sleep, but for now it gave the room the look of the old night-nursery at Stretton. Grace picked up the hairbrush again and began the long smooth strokes through her cousin’s hair. Clio looked pleased and Grace smiled over her shoulder at her reflection. ‘Look at us. We are alike, aren’t we?’ Clio did look, at Grace’s face behind her own, a pale moon in the dim room. The rain was still hammering down outside. She said, ‘I don’t know. I suppose we are, a little.’ The same night, in bed listening to the rain, Jake repeated what he had done under the hawthorn hedge. The sensation was less surprising and so even more pleasurable, but it was the sense of calm and relief afterwards that affected him most strongly. He knew that he would sleep, and that images of Grace and Clio and even Blanche and Eleanor would not rise up to torment and reproach him. His bed felt soft and safe, like arms wrapped around him. He began to speculate drowsily about his own unpredictable body, quiescent at last, however temporarily. He realized that he knew almost nothing about what made it work, or why he had been obliged to suffer for a month, or why it was considered wrong or dangerous or wicked to do what he had just done, so simply and satisfyingly. He knew even less about Grace’s body, even though he had speculated furtively about it for so many leaden days. What did Grace feel, what did Grace know? He did feel ashamed that he had frightened her. And yet, Jake thought, he knew Latin and classical Greek, and the planets of the solar system, and algebra and trigonometry, and the countries of the world and their rivers and mountains and principal exports. Why such ignorance about himself, his own insistent flesh and blood? Just before he fell asleep, an idea came to him. In the morning he found Nathaniel in the breakfast room, The Times folded beside his plate. They were the first members of the household to come down. Jake helped himself to ham and eggs from the silver dish on the sideboard and sat down beside his father. He ate hungrily, watching Nathaniel frowning over the news from Europe. Then he said, ‘May we discuss something, Pappy?’ Nathaniel put his newspaper aside. ‘Of course.’ ‘I have been thinking about what I should do. It’s time I had an idea. Even Hugo knows that he wants to be a soldier.’ ‘Even Hugo,’ Nathaniel agreed seriously. ‘I would like to study medicine. I should like to be a doctor.’ ‘You have never talked about this before.’ ‘I have been thinking. I know something about so many things, and nothing about myself. Anatomy, physiology, chemistry. It came to me that nothing would interest me more than to learn, and then to apply that knowledge. The world will need doctors. I could be a doctor, not a soldier.’ Nathaniel looked hard at him. He had been thinking that Jake had shaken off his preoccupation of the last weeks, regained his old animation. Whatever his problem had been with Grace, he must have found the answer to it. Nathaniel trusted his son enough to be certain that it was the right answer. He said, ‘If you are serious, I think it is a fine idea. I will talk to the medical man at College.’ Jake beamed at him, as pleased as a small boy. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. He went back to the sideboard and mounded his plate with a second helping of ham and eggs. Nathaniel turned back to his newspaper, but the grey print blurred. He was thinking about Julius and hoping that when his turn came for Grace’s attention, if it did come, he would deal with it as sensibly as Jake had done. Four (#u2bf208d7-2a0d-5ee2-b00e-16756161e98b) Blanche followed her housekeeper through the enfilade of rooms that ran along the south front of Stretton. The long vista was dim because the shutters were closed. The few bright beams of sunshine that pierced the cracks and fell across their path seemed solid enough to trip her, much more solid than the furniture invisible and shapeless under its dust-covers. She stepped through one of the golden rods, and the finger of it ran over her face and then fell back over the floor behind her. Blanche had flinched when the beam of sunlight touched her. She was thinking of Hugo, who had gone at last to join his regiment in France. She knew that he would be killed, she knew it with unshakeable certainty, and when she thought of him, as now, the air itself seemed to bruise her with its weight of terror. Blanche had to force herself to concentrate on Mrs Dixey’s broad back marching in front of her, to harness her thoughts to Stretton and these dim shuttered rooms. They were closing them up until the end of the war. If the day ever comes, Blanche thought. And if I could close up the fear, as if it were the saloon or the yellow drawing room … ‘The china from these rooms is all packed in the chests now, my lady,’ the housekeeper said. ‘And stored in the billiard room, like you ordered.’ ‘Very good,’ Blanche said automatically. The silver had been taken away to the security vaults, and the better pictures had been lifted down from the walls. There were darker rectangles on the faded silks and damasks, showing the places where generations of Strettons had stared down on their successors. But in the saloon, the Sargent portrait still hung in its accustomed place. John Leominster himself had given the order for it to be left. ‘I like to know it’s there,’ he had said gruffly. ‘In the place where it belongs, even if nothing else is.’ Blanche had not asked him why, because to ask or answer such a question would not be part of their expectations of each other, but she guessed that he thought of it as a kind of talisman. Perhaps he attached some superstitious importance to it, imagining that the old, pre-war order it seemed to stand for would somehow exert its benign influence over Hugo’s fate. She paused beneath the picture now, looking up into the innocent faces. As if it could, she thought bitterly. As if a society portrait of two silly girls could have any effect on Hugo in the trenches. But even as she dismissed the picture she felt a wave of longing for the days it recalled, for the measured, orderly pre-war times that she was afraid were gone for ever. Her own bright painted face, and Eleanor’s mirror of it, seemed to belong to a different generation. ‘Not this portrait, you know,’ Clio had said once to Elizabeth Ainger, during one of her rambling monologues. Elizabeth had barely glanced up at the picture that hung behind the old lady’s velvet chair. It was the work of a painter no longer very much admired, and she did not herself care for the violent expressionistic style. She knew the history of it, from family stories, and its title. The Janus Face. That was all. ‘I’m talking about the Sargent,’ Clio went on. ‘His portrait of Eleanor and Blanche. The Misses Holborough.’ ‘I know,’ Elizabeth said. The Stretton family had sold the picture in the Fifties and it was now housed in a private collection in Baltimore. She had never seen the famous Sargent itself, only reproductions of it. She had suggested to her publishers that they might try to obtain permission to use the double portrait as a frontispiece for the book. It was a pity, she thought, that the later picture, the one of Grace and Clio, was not more attractive or at least more celebrated. ‘This picture, the one of me and … and your grandmother, was intended to hang at Stretton alongside the other. But old John Leominster never liked it, and your …’ Clio paused and squinted sideways at Elizabeth, smiling a little. Elizabeth thought that she looked very old, and rather mad. ‘… the painter refused to sell it to him. He loaned it to my father, and there it stayed, in the Woodstock Road, for years and years.’ Clio’s head fell forward then, so that her chin seemed to touch her chest, and Elizabeth thought she might have fallen into one of her sudden sleeps. She could see the shape of her skull under the thin hair and paper skin, and she was touched with pity for her. But then the skull-head jerked up again, and the surprisingly bright eyes flicked to her. ‘Such a lot of years, eh? Why are you interested in so much long-ago, forgotten nonsense?’ ‘It’s my trade,’ Elizabeth answered, ‘I’m a biographer.’ The pity was still with her and she could not make herself say, ‘your biographer’. Blanche turned her back on the mocking optimistic faces. She looked around the shadowy saloon again, up at the great glass chandelier that had been swathed in burlap, and at the ghostly shapes of gilt chairs and console tables under their dust-sheets. The huge house seemed already dead. The clocks had been allowed to run down and not even their ticking disturbed the silence. Blanche imagined that she could hear the dust settling. In September 1916 John Leominster had decided that it was his patriotic duty to free as many men as possible from his house and estate to help with the war effort. From the outbreak of the war the house had been run by a minimum of staff, but now Stretton was being entirely closed up. The land and the farms would be left in the care of a manager who would oversee the growth of food crops, and the family was migrating to London, to the Belgrave Square house. ‘You have done a very good job, Mrs Dixey, you and the men.’ The butler and two of the footmen, all too old for active service, were accompanying the family to Belgrave Square. Mrs Dixey and her husband, in their quarters at the far end of one wing, would be left as the sole guardians of a hundred lifeless rooms. ‘Thank you, my lady,’ Mrs Dixey said. They hesitated, unbalanced for an instant in their familiar relation to each other by this dislocation of the house. The housekeeper saw the expression in Blanche’s eyes and understood it, because two of her own boys were in France. She wanted to put out her hand to touch her employer’s arm and say, ‘God will watch them for us.’ But she knew her place too well and stood silently instead, waiting to see if there would be any more instructions. Blanche sighed. John was waiting for her in his office. ‘I think that will be all,’ she said. She crossed beneath the portrait without looking at it and walked slowly back over the thin bars of light. John was sitting at his desk, staring into the pigeonholes with their neat sheaves of paper, but when Blanche came in his face lightened. He stood up and put out his hands to rest on her shoulders, then drew her closer to him. Blanche let her head droop until it rested against him. They stood still, finding comfort in one another. Blanche and John had not founded their marriage on words, because John had never been able to express his thoughts or feelings. Instead, Blanche had learnt to interpret the different languages of their silence. She knew that he heard her fear, and shared it with her. She began to cry helplessly, her face pressed against the rough tweed of his coat. Upstairs in the schoolroom, Grace was sitting alone on the floor. Nanny had taken eight-year-old Phoebe away to the nursery, to select whatever books and toys must be packed up and sent by the carrier to the London house. She had given Grace instructions to prepare her own belongings, as well as Thomas’s, who had returned to his prep school. But Grace had not even opened the doors of any of the tall, brown-varnished cupboards that lined the room. She sat in a patch of sunlight with her legs stretched out in front of her, scanning the familiar surroundings. At the old desk she had sat to listen to Miss Alcott, or one of her predecessors, stifling her yawns over the atlas or the French grammar. She wondered, if all the minutes were added together, how many hours of her life she must have spent staring out of the window, over the trees of the park towards the brown hills. When they were both very small, she had had Hugo for company. But then Hugo had gone away to school, and all through the long termtimes she had suffered the governess alone. She had always hated her isolation and the unfairness of what she considered to be her imprisonment. The Babies had been no consolation. Even now, at eleven, Thomas was no more than an infuriating little boy. Grace smiled suddenly. The holidays had been different. The holidays had always meant the Hirsh cousins, and when they were all at Stretton this room had been their headquarters. She scrambled to her feet now, and went over to the desk. It had a sloping wooden seat, worn shiny, connected to the desk part by braces of cast iron. The metal had been rubbed shiny too, by her own restless feet. Grace lifted the white china inkwell out of its round hole and turned it upside down. The ink had dried out, and Miss Alcott was gone. Grace was fifteen, and she was finished with the schoolroom. She lifted the lid of the desk. One wet afternoon Jake had carved his initials with a penknife. She could see his face now, his tongue protruding slightly as he worked and a thick lock of black hair falling into his eyes. Grace ran her fingertips over the JNH. The letters were deep, and even. Julius had taken the knife from him after that. JEH was fainter, scratched rather than carved, but with curlicues extending from the arms of the H. Grace followed the flourishes of them with her fingernail, her eyes half closing. After that it had been the girls’ turn. They had bickered about who was to go first, and then they had carved their semi-alphabets with laborious care. GEACS and CBAGH. Clio’s carving was better than her own, Grace saw now. When the initials were all complete Jake had taken a pair of dividers and scratched a circle to enclose them all, the magic circle. ‘Grace? What are you doing?’ It was Nanny, calling from the nursery. Very gently, Grace traced the circle and then she lowered the desk lid, hiding the carvings once more. ‘Packing,’ she answered. Grace didn’t want to move to London. The London house was gloomy, and the rush of the city outside seemed only to emphasize her isolation within it. Grace understood her own position perfectly well. She was too old for the schoolroom and too young to go out in Society, even the restricted version of Society that was all the war allowed. She knew that she was facing a prospect of suitable war-work under Blanche’s supervision; days of packing dressings for the Red Cross, or knitting socks, with walks in Hyde Park and tea with the daughters of Blanche’s friends regarded as adequate diversions. Grace wished she had been born a boy. Then she could go to the front, like Hugo. She was quite sure that Hugo would come home again, so certain of it that she did not even bother to try to define why. He would come home, probably with a medal, and all the glory would be heaped on him. There was no glory in rolling bandages. There was no glory, Grace thought, in any of the things she might do. She wandered to the window and looked down. The trees showed the first yellow and ochre of autumn. Soon the frosts would come and there would be the scent of woodsmoke and apples, but she would be in London looking out into Belgrave Square. It isn’t fair. I wish I were someone else. It was a new sensation, for Grace, to be dissatisfied with her position in life. Until now she had always felt able to direct matters to suit herself, to arrange the world according to her own requirements. But she understood suddenly how small the world of her childhood had been, and realized that she was about to exchange that world for an adult one, no bigger and circumscribed by propriety and convention. Grace lifted one fist and banged it against the glass of the schoolroom window. Then, out loud, she said the worst word she knew. The pointless syllable fell away into silence. ‘When will this war be over?’ she demanded of the empty room. She meant, When will everything else begin? Impatience budded inside her like an ulcer. ‘Grace, you haven’t done one single thing.’ In the doorway, Phoebe appeared and Nanny Brodribb behind her, standing with her hands on her hips. Grace knew that meant she was angry. She also knew that she could easily wheedle her back into a good humour. ‘Please, Broddy, will you start on it for me? I don’t know where to begin. I just want to go downstairs for five minutes and then I’ll be back, I truly promise.’ ‘Will you, now?’ Grace went, leaving Phoebe clicking her tongue in imitation of Nanny. ‘Grace is very lazy,’ she heard her say. The marble stairway that circled under the central dome was littered with woodshavings, curled like severed pigtails, and the wide marble expanse of the floor below was cluttered with boxes. An old man in a green baize apron was labelling each crate. Grace loved Stretton and had never considered that it would not stay the same for ever. She hated to see it dismantled like this, being packed away like a Whit Monday fairground. She found her parents in her father’s study. As she hesitated at the door and saw them turn away from each other it occurred to her that they might have been embracing. The notion was embarrassing, and she forgot it as quickly as she could. She also saw that Blanche had been crying. The tears were for Hugo, of course. Grace shrugged, awkwardly, wanting to reassure her out of her own fund of certainty that Hugo would not be killed, but there was something in her mother’s defeatism that irritated her and diffused her sympathy. ‘Yes, Grace, what is it?’ John said. He had never been easy with his daughters. As meekly as she could, Grace asked, ‘I wondered if I might go to Oxford, to be with Clio. Instead of staying by myself in London?’ John was never in favour of other people’s suggestions, particularly his children’s, and he stared at her now as if she had suggested removing to Australia. ‘What can you mean? You will not be by yourself. Your mother and I will be there, and your sister, and Thomas in the school holidays. As well as the rest of the household.’ Blanche looked at her daughter. She had expected that Grace would grow up to be calm and controlled, and pliant where necessary, but Grace was none of those things. She was eager and strong-willed, and so full of impatience and the taste of her own needs that Blanche was sometimes afraid she might split her own skin, showing the soft pulp beneath like a ripe fruit. ‘I think Aunt Eleanor has enough to worry about.’ Except that her sons were safe. Jacob had kept to his declaration of pacifism. He had deferred his entry into medical school and was serving in France as an orderly in a field hospital. Julius was on the point of entering the Royal College of Music. ‘She wouldn’t need to worry about me. Perhaps I could help her. Perhaps I could even go to Clio’s school for a few months. Until the war is over.’ ‘I don’t know,’ Blanche said. Grace did. She also knew when to save her ammunition. She smiled acquiescently now. ‘Well, perhaps,’ she said. She went back upstairs to the big brown cupboards and began laying out her own possessions and Thomas’s ready for transporting to London and Oxford. Julius and Clio sat on a bench underneath the walnut tree in the garden at Woodstock Road. They were reading, and they sat turned inwards towards each other, their profiles identically inclined over their books. Grace had no book, and she had already walked the flagged paths between Eleanor’s flowerbeds. ‘You are very lucky,’ Grace said to Clio. ‘Do you know how lucky you are?’ The twins looked up at her, and it seemed to Grace that they smiled the same patient smile. Grace had never felt jealous of Clio before. She had envied her the relative freedom of life in the Oxford house, and the constant company of her brothers, and her easy confident store of knowledge, but she had never before thought that it would be preferable to be Clio Hirsh than to be Lady Grace Stretton. But now, it seemed, Clio had everything that she did not. Jake was no longer at home, of course, but Clio still had Julius, and the bond between the twins had strengthened since Jake had gone away. When Blanche set her free at last, on a long visit to the Oxford family, Grace had plenty of time to observe her cousins. Watching them, seeing how comfortable they were together and how they seemed to know without speaking what the other was thinking, Grace felt her own solitude like an affliction. She wished that she could share the same intimacy with someone. She found herself reaching out to Clio, on this visit, as she had never done before. Without even admitting it to herself, Grace had begun to dismantle the old barriers. She stopped trying to be better, or quicker, or louder, and she started to follow Clio’s lead. She wanted to be like a sister, like a third twin to Clio and Julius, instead of merely sharing the accident of a birthday. Since the beginning of the war Clio had grown up and away from Grace, who knew she had done no more than mark time in the schoolroom at Stretton. Unlike Grace, with her undirected impatience and energy, Clio had acquired a sense of purpose. Encouraged by Nathaniel she had decided that she wanted to study for an Oxford degree in modern languages, and was planning to enter one of the women’s halls. She worked hard at her books, making Grace feel stupid and aimless in comparison. Clio also had useful practical work to do. The house in the Woodstock Road was no longer filled with a stream of undergraduates coming to visit Nathaniel and to sit talking and arguing until Eleanor fed them. Most of the students had been swallowed up by the war and those few who remained were quieter and more jealous of their time. The house had seemed unnaturally empty and quiet until Eleanor had offered it as a convalescent home for wounded officers. The men came in twos and threes, physically more or less repaired but in need of rest, and comfort, and security. Eleanor and Clio nursed them, but they also talked and read to them, and Julius played chess, and Tabby and Alice ran in and out of their rooms, and so the men were drawn into the family. They seemed to thrive in the warmth of it. Each time one of them became well enough to leave, the Hirshes said goodbye with as much affection as if he were a son or a brother. Grace saw all this, and she admired it. She was always clear-sighted enough to know what was worthy of approval. She was generous in her open admiration of Clio, and Clio responded to her generosity. For the first time Clio became the leader and arbiter, and in a matter of days she lost the layers of her own resentment and jealousy of Grace that had built up over all their years together. They became friends, knowing that they had never truly been friends before. ‘Why am I so lucky?’ Clio asked, still smiling. ‘I’ve got three pages of French translation to do, and an essay on Robespierre, and there’s an ink stain in the front of the skirt of my good dress.’ ‘You’re a Hirsh, and a twin,’ Grace answered seriously. They both knew how impossible such an acknowledgement would have been only a few months ago. Clio slid sideways on the garden bench, drawing up her serge skirt to make room, and held out her hand to Grace. ‘You’re a Stretton. Sursum corda,’ she said. ‘Lift up your hearts’ was the Stretton family motto, and the cousins considered it appropriately Culmington. ‘And you are a twin.’ Julius had put his book down and he moved to one side too as Grace sat between them. He put his arm across her shoulder and Grace leant back, resting her head against the sleeve of his coat. She sighed, and then turned her face so that she could look up at him. ‘Am I, Julius?’ Julius contemplated the sheen of her pale skin, and the fine hairs at the tail end of her eyebrow, and the small vertical cleft beneath her lower lip that she had inherited from her father, and he knew that he loved her as much as he loved Clio, and that she filled a space in his life that was not sisterly at all, but much more intriguing and enchanting. He could not remember even how long he had loved her, but he knew the roots of it went a long way back, and deep within him, and that the love was very important to him, but it carried no sense of threat because he knew it was immutable. ‘Is that really what you want to be?’ he asked her, teasingly, because that was the language they used with one another. Grace said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Then consider it a fact,’ Julius told her. ‘Thank you.’ She lifted her head and kissed him on the cheek. Being physically close to Julius always made Grace feel happy. There was a wholesomeness about him that she liked very much. His olive-coloured skin smelt good, and he gave and received kisses and hugs quite naturally, as if they were a matter of course. Jake did not, she remembered. Jake jumped and started as if something hurt him, and then he clutched with overheated hands and frightened her. When she was not frightened she recognized an avid, beseeching kind of eagerness in him. It embarrassed her, and made her want to laugh, and that was not what he wanted from her at all. Jake and Grace had not seen very much of one another since the summer at the beginning of the war, and when they had met they had ignored the few opportunities of being alone together, as if by mutual agreement. And yet, since he had been at the hospital in France, Jake had written to her three or four times. They were extraordinary letters that didn’t seem to speak with Jake’s familiar voice. Grace kept them tied with a piece of braid in a pocket of her writing case. She did not take them out to reread when a new letter came, but quickly undid the braid and then fastened it up again. Grace kissed Clio too, and then sat back with satisfaction between the two of them. It was comfortable with Julius’s arm around her, and with Clio on the other side, companionable instead of challenging. I was lonely, Grace thought, and now I’m not lonely. She felt sleepily grateful to Clio and Julius. Clio picked up her book again. ‘May I finish my French, please?’ It was the middle of October and the lawns and flowerbeds were overlaid with a brown mosaic of fallen leaves, but the bench was sheltered by a high wall of red brick and the afternoon sun was warm. For once, Grace felt glad that there was nothing else to do but sit here, resting her head against Julius’s shoulder. At the beginning of her visit, wanting to prove her good intentions, Grace had repeated her suggestion that she might perhaps accompany Clio to her day school in Oxford. But most of the girls were the studious daughters of dons, and Grace had seen at once from the reactions of Nathaniel and Clio herself that she would be hopelessly out of her depth in a class with her own age group. She had no desire to be relegated to studying with the twelve-year-olds, and so she added quickly, ‘But my father might not want that, and perhaps I could do something here for Aunt Eleanor that would be more useful than mathematics?’ ‘Nothing is more useful than mathematics, except possibly Latin,’ Nathaniel had said severely. But the Hirshes had agreed that Grace would be a valuable assistant for Eleanor in looking after the convalescents. Lately it had become her job to lay trays and to hurry upstairs with them, to cut up food and to carry hot water in jugs, and to do whatever she could to save her aunt’s legs and the energies of the overworked housemaids. The men liked Grace, although she did not find it easy to be relaxed and happy with them and to forget what they had suffered, as Clio seemed able to do. The middle of the afternoon, once the luncheon trays had been cleared away, was the quiet part of the day. The convalescents were sleeping, or reading, and even Tabby and Alice were resting. It was good, Grace reflected, to be busy enough to find a break in the afternoon sunshine so welcome. Julius stirred beside her. ‘Are you asleep?’ he whispered. ‘No. Just thinking.’ Of all Grace’s moods and humours, and he could have listed a score without any effort, Julius liked her contemplative manner best. He felt closest to her then, as if they could exchange ideas without words, across some invisible membrane. ‘Serious thoughts?’ She smiled at once, skimming away from him. ‘Not very. Not at all.’ Clio jammed her fingers into her ears and hunched closer over her textbook. ‘I’m trying to work. Please.’ Julius lifted his arm from Grace’s shoulders, yawned, and stretched his long legs. ‘And I have to go and practise.’ Grace said, ‘May I come and listen?’ She liked to be the audience, sitting silently through the music and applauding when he reached the end of a piece. Sometimes Julius played to his audience of one, tucking his violin under his arm and making a deep bow, and sometimes he lost himself in the music and forgot her altogether. ‘You certainly may,’ Clio answered for him, and Julius and Grace laughed and walked back through the garden to the house. Julius’s room was bare, like a monk’s cell. The papers and sheets of music on his table were laid in neat piles and squared off at right angles to each other. The covers on the iron-framed bed were drawn up with the same geometric precision. The only ornament was an engraving of the head of Mozart hanging on the wall next to the window. Grace hesitated between the smooth bed and the upright chair in a corner, and opted for the chair. She sat down, straight-backed, and folded her hands in her lap. Julius lifted his violin and tucked it beneath his chin. Grace saw how it became part of him. With the tip of his bow he indicated the sheet music on the music stand. ‘The Rondo Capriccioso, Camille Saint-Sa?ns,’ he announced formally. And then he added, ‘It’s rather difficult, in parts.’ It was one of the pieces his teacher had recommended he work up for his Royal College audition. The flying staccato run in E major still made him feel sweaty when he thought of it. ‘It calls for practice, Julius,’ his teacher had advised him. He took a breath now and lifted his bow. Grace listened, intently at first, but then her attention began to wander. There was a fast section, where the notes seemed to climb and tumble over each other, and each time he played it Grace was sure that this time Julius would be satisfied with it and move on. But each time he broke off and jerked his bow away from the strings, closed his eyes to refocus his attention, and then began again, over and over. Grace could not even hear what it was that displeased him. She would have been incapable of such perfectionism herself. All her own instincts would have led her to scramble through the awkward passage somehow, anyhow, and then to hurry on, aiming for the end in one triumphant rush. Julius stopped yet again, and patiently began one more time. He had forgotten she was there. She watched his face with its shuttered look of intense concentration. She knew that Clio’s schoolfriends considered Julius to be handsome, and she had agreed with their judgement without giving it very much thought. Now, as she studied him with detachment through the skein of music, she noticed that he had heavy rounded eyelids that looked as if they might have been sculpted and a deep upper lip with a strongly defined margin, and that his perfectly harmonious features were more feminine than conventionally handsome. He looked like Clio, of course. And so there was much more than an echo of her own face in Julius’s. She had known it, but now she catalogued the similarities as if she had never been aware of them before, the colour of eyes and skin, the shape of mouth and ears and the height of cheekbones. Grace smiled faintly. The music flowed on. This time, she realized, there was no stopping. The log jam of tumbling notes broke up and was carried away in the stream of the melody. Grace found herself leaning forward on her hard chair and willing him on, holding her breath for him as if it would help him to reach the release at the end of the piece. The music swelled, filling her head and the bare room until she sat on the edge of her seat, her lips apart and her eyes fixed on Julius’s blind absorbed face. The echo of the last chord vibrated in the stillness before she realized it was finished, and then Julius raised his head and she saw his shining eyes. He was panting for breath. ‘Bravo,’ Grace shouted. She jumped off the chair and clapped her hands until the bones jarred. ‘Julius, bravo. That was wonderful.’ He nested his violin carefully in its case, then straightened up again. ‘It was better, anyway,’ he gasped. ‘No,’ Grace said seriously. ‘It was wonderful.’ She meant it, and he heard it in her voice, and he crooked his arm around her shoulders again. ‘Thank you,’ he said. Empty of the music, the room seemed very silent. They stood side by side, next to the window, looking down into the garden. Clio’s bent head was visible beneath the walnut tree at the far end, and beyond her were the trees of other gardens with bare branches beginning to poke through their faded summer covering, and the gables and slate roofs and brick chimneys of North Oxford. Grace liked the domesticity of this view, after the emptiness of Stretton Park and the grimy, pompous expanse of Belgrave Square. It amused her to imagine the blameless academic lives that were lived behind all the blandly shining windows. Julius had no attention to spare for the view. He was too conscious of Grace’s warm shoulder and arm beneath his own. He had grown rapidly in the last year – he was taller even than Jake now – and he stood a head higher than Clio and Grace. Grace seemed very slight and fragile next to his own lumbering bulk. He turned his head very slightly, breathlessly, so that he could look down on the top of her dark head. Clio still wore her hair in a long plait that hung down her back, but Grace had put her hair up in a shiny, smooth roll that showed her ears. He could see the pink rim of her ear now, and the whiteness of her neck in the shadow of her blouse collar. He felt a spasm of tenderness for her, and at the same time a startling, fierce determination that he would never allow anything to hurt her. He moved round so that he stood in front of her, blocking out the vista of trees and rooftops. Grace looked up at him, her mouth opening a little, surprised but unafraid. Julius wanted to take her face between his hands and hold it, so that he could study all the contours of it, but he felt too clumsy to trust himself. Instead he bent forward, slowly and stiffly, and kissed the corner of her mouth. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, afterwards. ‘I know it is,’ Grace answered. She was at ease with Julius. She didn’t feel any of the fear or fascination that Jake had set off inside her two summers ago. Julius was safe. His smooth skin smelt faintly of honey, she identified it now. He carried an aura of cleanliness with him. She knew that he loved her, and she loved him back, a love with clearly defined parameters. Julius blushed. He was suffused with happiness that made him feel weak and light-headed, but he also felt quite calm and secure. There was no rush, no cause for anxiety. Grace was here, and there was plenty of time. If he had made himself analyse it he would not have been able to define what exactly there was time for, now or in the mysterious future, but the rush of happiness defeated logic. He wanted to lift Grace up in his arms and swing her round, laughing and shouting, but the knowledge of his own clumsiness restrained him again. Instead he reached out and touched her shoulder, near where the collar of her blouse folded against her throat. Immediately all the sensation in his body concentrated itself in his fingertips. The fabric semed ethereally soft, as if it might melt under his touch. He shook his head, slowly, in amazement. Grace reached up and took his hand. She turned him gently so that they faced the window again, and then settled herself against him, in the crook of his arm. To Julius, the gesture seemed wonderfully natural and confiding. He held her and they went on looking out at the view together. He didn’t know how long it was they stood there, but it seemed a long time. At last, they heard Tabby running down the linoleum corridor outside the door. She was calling for Eleanor, and there was a clatter as she jumped three steps in the angle of the passage and skidded along the slippery stretch to the nursery. Another door slammed somewhere else in the house, and Grace and Julius remembered that they were not the only people in the world. Grace stepped to one side and put her hands up to her hair, smoothing it where it was already smooth. Julius loved the womanly economy of the gesture. He was thinking, I will remember this, the look of her, the way she is outlined in the light against the window. ‘I must go and help Aunt Eleanor,’ she said. Julius watched her go, and watched the door for a long moment after it had closed behind her. Then he picked up his violin again. He could play the Rondo now, he wasn’t afraid of it any longer. Nathaniel came home, bringing the evening papers with him. Eleanor hurried to meet him as she always did, as soon as she heard his key in the lock. Their eyes met, telling one another, No bad news. Not yet. Only then did Nathaniel kiss her. Tabby and Alice came running and he lifted them up in turn and swung them in the air, growling like a bear to make them laugh and then scream to be put down again. Julius came more slowly down the stairs and Nathaniel clasped him briefly. They were the same height, now. Evenings in the Woodstock Road belonged to the family. It was one of the things Grace particularly liked about staying with the Hirshes, that there had never been the starching and combing before the stiff half-hour visit to the drawing room that was always the routine at home. Before dinner Eleanor and Nathaniel always sat in the big, comfortable room at the back of the house that looked down over a narrow wrought-iron balcony into the garden. Nathaniel sometimes played Pelmanism with the children, all of them ranged in a circle around the mahogany table. A lamp with a shade of multi-coloured glass threw flecks of different-coloured light on the ring of faces. On other evenings Eleanor played the piano or Julius his violin, and the children took it in turns to sing. Nathaniel particularly enjoyed the singing, and would join in in his resonant bass. His voice was so unsuited to the sentimental Victorian ballads that Eleanor favoured that the children would have to struggle to avoid collapsing into furtive giggles. At other times there were the general knowledge games that Grace dreaded because she seemed to know even less than Tabby, and she would hurriedly suggest charades or recitations as a diversion. Jake’s special piece had always been a theatrical rendering of ‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’; when she closed her eyes on this evening’s tableau of Eleanor sewing and Julius and Nathaniel playing cards with the little girls, Grace could hear him intoning ‘I sprang to the stirrup’. He always snatched up the invisible bridle and bared his teeth like a brigand. There was no Jake tonight, of course. They felt his absence. With her new empathy Grace knew that Clio, hunched over a book in the corner of the room, was not reading but thinking about him. Jake’s place was taken by two of Eleanor’s convalescents. They sat near to her, talking quietly. But for this difference the well-worn room looked just as it always did, with its sagging seats and piles of books and newspapers, and the murky picture of steamers on the Rhine that always hung on the wall facing the French windows. But Grace was possessed by the realization that everything was changing. The war had crept in here, into the Woodstock Road as well as Stretton; she had not even understood how significantly. She tasted a mixture of resentment and apprehension, dry in her mouth. When Clio’s eyes wandered yet again from her book they met Grace’s. Even the old ground between them was changing its contours, but they were both glad of that. They needed their new friendship now. Before dinner, Nanny came to take Alice and Tabby back up to the nursery. Nathaniel poured sherry into little cut-glass thimbles for the men, and there was general talk until it was time to go in to dinner. Tonight, one of the housemaids had placed the evening post on a silver tray that stood on the hall table. When the family crossed the hall on the way to the dining room they saw that there were two thin blue foreign envelopes lying side by side. Eleanor moved with surprising speed. She scooped up the two letters from Jake and then, seeing the inscriptions, she held one of them out with a little involuntary sigh of disappointment. ‘One is for you, Grace.’ It was the first letter she had received in the Woodstock Road. The others had been addressed to Stretton, or Belgrave Square. She took it, feeling the harsh crackle of the envelope between her fingers. She put it straight into the pocket of her skirt, without looking at it. She felt that the Hirshes were watching her, as if she had taken something that was rightfully theirs. ‘Shall we go in?’ Nathaniel murmured at last. Eleanor opened her letter and had read it before the maid placed the soup tureen on the table in front of her. She looked up from the single flimsy sheet of paper. ‘He’s well,’ she said. ‘There is – there was when he was writing, rather – a kind of lull. He calls it the calm before the next storm.’ There were tears plainly visible in Eleanor’s eyes, but no one was careless enough to see them. She refolded the letter and handed it down the table to Nathaniel, and then began briskly ladling soup. Captain Smith, one of the convalescents, said, ‘I admire what your son is doing, Professor. I was in one of those hospitals before they sent me back home. They do a fine job.’ He wanted them to know he understood Jake’s beliefs, wanted them to be aware that he didn’t consider him a shirker. It was not the Captain’s fault that he sounded like Hugo. Grace’s eyes met Clio’s again. Nathaniel lifted his head. ‘Of course,’ he said. The letter passed to Julius, and then to Clio. They were greedy for the news, there was no question of politely waiting until dinner was over. Grace felt the generosity of it when Clio passed the blue paper to her in her turn. She was aware of the second letter burning in her pocket. Jake wrote of the work he was doing, but only as numbers, how many casualties arriving, how many hours on duty, how few hours sleep. The rest of the letter was taken up with his thoughts on John Donne, whose poems he had been reading, and with reminiscences of home. He recalled the day of the picnic beside the river. Grace gave the letter back to Eleanor. ‘Jake will be a good doctor,’ she said to fill the silence, but the random remark struck a chord of optimism. It looked ahead to a better time, beyond the necessity of survival. Eleanor’s face softened. ‘I believe so,’ she said. The maid came to clear away their soup plates. After dinner, it was usual for Grace to sit with Clio and Julius while they read or worked, but tonight she left the table and went quickly up through the odd layers of the house to the room she shared with Clio. She half sat and half leant against her high bed, and opened the envelope. The letter was longer. There were three sheets of the flimsy paper, each one closely covered with Jake’s black handwriting. Grace bent her head, and began to read. The words burned off the page. There were no careful sentences here, nothing like the letter he had addressed to Nathaniel and Eleanor. Jake had simply written what he felt, disjointed snatches of it, letting the raw suffering lie where it spilt. It was these images that had informed his earlier letters, the awkward and troubling missives that she had not wanted to look at again, but Jake had kept them veiled, somehow, saving her eyes. Now he had passed some last point of endurance, and Grace saw clearly what Jake was seeing. Oh, Grace, the horror of it. Grace, do you hear me? I hold on to your name, like a clean white river pebble in my fingers. They come in all day and all night, stretchers, cargoes of what were once men, pulp and jelly of flesh, turned black, bones like splinters. Crying and screaming and praying, or lying mute like children. I am afraid of each day, each death. We are close to the lines here, I can hear the guns. We run like ants, doctors and orderlies and bearers, like ants over the blood heaps, but we can do so little. Death keeps coming, the tide of it. Some of the men I work with indemnify themselves with a kind of terrible laughter, but I can’t laugh, Grace. All I can see and hear and smell is the suffering. Each separate pain, loss, life gone or broken. The deaths are all different. We have to leave them, most of them, to the chaplains or themselves. There was a boy like Hugo, younger, who screamed and cursed. His anger poured out of him as fast as blood. As hot. And another man, an old Cockney, wept for his mother. Like a baby cries, like Alice. I have tried to read. I know there is beauty and order somewhere, but I can’t recall it. I look at the words on the page, and I see death. I try to see your face, Clio’s face, my mother’s. I am afraid of death, I am afraid of life like this, I am afraid for us all. I think of Hugo, under the guns. I think of all our deaths, yours and mine and the others; the same deaths, over and over, each of them different. I have tried to assemble the disciplines of logic, and marshal the proofs of what human suffering has won for humanity, but I can find no logic here. There is only madness. I am afraid that I am mad. Grace, you should not have to hear this. Forgive me. I think of you, and of home. Julius and Clio. Of you, especially. All this will end, it must end. But when it is done, whatever the outcome, nothing can be the same as it once was. I am sad for what we have lost, for what we are losing every day. Grace lifted her head, but she didn’t see the room with its two white beds and her own gilt-backed hairbrushes laid out beside Clio’s on the dressing table. She could only see Jake, and after a moment she looked down again at the last page. The black handwriting had deteriorated so much that she could only just decipher the words. Jake was writing about Donne again, but not in the detached, analytical way he had done in Eleanor’s letter. As far as Grace could understand, he had taken some of the poems as speaking directly to him. They had taken on a significance for him that she could only guess at. There is one, ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, do you know it? It is about loss and grief. There is one couplet: ‘He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.’ It runs in my head, all the time, while I am doing my antlike scurrying. We are all re-begot as nothingness by this war. The evil of it, the waste. I have to go now. We live in a canvas shelter, and I sit on my camp bed to write this on my lap by candlelight. Perhaps you can’t even read the words. Perhaps I should not send them to you, but I need to reach out. It is another weakness. I am afraid of my own cowardice, too. You are so clean and white, Grace, like nothing here. When will it all end? For some reason Jake had signed not his name but his initials. It made Grace think again of the schoolroom at Stretton, of their old secure and undervalued world. She said aloud, ‘You are not a coward.’ The window opposite her had been left wide open after the warmth of the day, but the night air was icy now. It rolled in like a hill mist and Grace shivered as it touched her bare shoulders. She did not move, or fold the letter into its creases again. She knew that she would never forget the way Jake spoke to her out of it. It was the letter’s fusion of two voices that touched her most profoundly. There was the old Jake, who had whispered their secrets to her in the hot summer before the war began, and from whom she had in the end retreated. Out of fear of the unknown, out of childish impatience. And there was the Jake she did not know, who had witnessed the field hospital. The images of it came to her now, in Jake’s disconnected words, pulp and jelly of flesh, bones like splinters … And just as Jake had become two Jakes, boy and man, so the world had split into two worlds, old and new. Not only for herself, Grace understood that, but for all of them. Images of the old world were all around her. There was this room with its mundane evidences of their girlhood, and in the framed snapshots on Clio’s tallboy there were memories of Christmases, holiday games at Stretton, beach cricket in Norfolk or Normandy. The new world was obliterating everything that had once been familiar. Jake and Hugo in France were part of the fearsome new world, and the officers who came to mend themselves in this house, and so were the newspapers with their black headlines and their casualty lists, and even the women who served behind shop counters where there had once been men were part of it too. For a long time, for almost two years Grace realized, she had thought of the war as a momentous event that touched them all, but as an episode that would eventually be over, leaving the world to continue as before. It was on that day in October 1916, the day of Jake’s letter, that she understood there could be no going on as before. If Hugo came home again, he would not be the same boy who had marched off in his fresh uniform. Jake would not be the boy who had kissed her in the angle of the hawthorn hedge. For all of them, whatever they had done, there would always be the speculation: If there had been no war. If part of a generation had not been lost. Grace read the last, scrawled page of the letter once more. I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not. But then she put the pages aside. The blackness of the lines stirred an opposing determination in her. Grace found herself making a bargain with a Providence she had never troubled to address before. Let them come home, she bartered, and we will make something new out of ‘things which are not’. We don’t cease to exist, those of us who are left. We’ll make another world. She could not have said what world, or how, but she felt the power of her own determination as a partial salve. Behind her, the bedroom door creaked open and Clio slipped into the room. ‘Grace? It’s so cold in here.’ She went to the window, closed it, and drew the curtains over the square of darkness. She did not ask, but Grace picked up the pages of the letter and gave them to her. ‘Read it,’ she said in a low voice. Afterwards Clio sat down beside Grace on the edge of the high bed. She was ashamed that amidst all her love for Jake, and fear for him, there was a shiver of jealousy that he should have written in such a way to Grace, not to herself, or Julius. And yet she understood that in the terrible hospital Jake needed to reach out to his ideal of whiteness and cleanliness, his smooth river pebble. That was not a family entity, and so Jake turned to what was closest to home, to Grace. So she told herself. The two girls let their heads rest together, the smooth roll of hair and the thick plait the same colour and texture, side by side. They were still sitting in the same position when Julius found them. He took his place next to Grace, making the same arrangement as on the garden bench. He still felt happy, remembering that he had kissed her. The letter did not surprise Julius, neither the horror of it nor Jake’s image of Grace. His vivid imagination had led him closer to the reality of what Jake was suffering, and he loved Grace to the point where he would have been more surprised to find that his brother did not. It did not occur to Julius to feel jealous. ‘I wish he would come home,’ Clio said savagely. ‘He will, and Hugo,’ Grace promised. ‘Everything will start again. We’ll make it.’ When Eleanor came up, the letter was hidden in the folds of Clio’s dress. All three of them knew that it was for the magic circle alone. They felt that for even Eleanor to see it would be a betrayal. That night, although she had not had the nightmare for years, Grace dreamt of her own death by drowning. Five (#u2bf208d7-2a0d-5ee2-b00e-16756161e98b) The turret room was growing familiar. As he lay in bed the soldier had learnt the contour of it, the regular square of one side and then the hemispherical opposite bulge where the tower was grafted on to the red brick absurdity of the house. He had looked up at the turret, blinking his sore eyes at the white winter sky, when they wheeled him into the house from the ambulance. Since he had been brought home from Cambrai he had seen nothing but the rigid lines of the hospital ward, and this apparition of a house with its crenellations and gables had made him momentarily afraid of hallucinations again. He had gripped the wooden arms of the wheelchair and found them solid, and had looked again to see that the house was solid too, an architect’s fantasy castle planted in the North Oxford street. There were bare-branched cherry trees in the front garden, and a child’s discarded wooden engine beside the path. As they lifted him up the steps a woman had come out to greet him. She was statuesque, dressed in a plain grey afternoon dress, with her coils of dark hair put up in the pre-war fashion. ‘I am Eleanor Hirsh,’ she said, smiling at him. When she held out her hand it was as if they were being introduced in a London drawing room. After the months in the trenches and the indignities of hospital, the simple gesture was like a benediction. When he took her hand he saw that there were no rings except for a thin wedding band and a small diamond, and that the fingers looked as if they were accustomed to harder work than writing invitation cards. ‘And you are Captain Dennis.’ Peter Dennis forgot, momentarily, that he was in a wheelchair with his head bandaged and all his senses dislocated. He made a little bow from the waist that was almost courtly. ‘Welcome to my house,’ Eleanor said. The nurses and the driver who had come with him from the hospital half pushed and half carried his chair up into the house. There was another nurse here, and Peter Dennis had a confused impression of a dark-brown hallway, many more stairs and passages, children’s faces solemnly watching him, all blurred by renewed pain as he was lifted out of the wheelchair and carried up to the turret room. He heard that his attendants called the dark-haired woman Madam or Mrs Hirsh, but that the children’s voices rising up through the house cried ‘Mama …’ The room they put him into was blessedly quiet, and filled with the reflections of light from the pointed windows in the turret. The new nurse helped him into the high iron-framed bed and he lay back against the down pillows and closed his eyes. Eleanor took Tabby and Alice down to the kitchen with her. ‘You mustn’t make too much noise,’ she told them. ‘Captain Dennis has been very ill, and now he will need to rest quietly.’ ‘May we go and see him?’ Tabby asked. ‘I could show him my sewing.’ ‘Perhaps, in a day or so.’ ‘Did a German shoot him, as well?’ Alice demanded. It was her standard question. ‘Captain Dennis was very brave. He was fighting to defend what he believes in, and he was wounded. But the German soldier who fired at him was probably just as brave, and defending his own in the same way.’ It was a variation on Eleanor’s standard reply. With her own pacifist sons, her husband’s German blood and the male Strettons’ fierce jingoism to reconcile, she felt it was the best she could do. ‘Like Hugo?’ ‘Yes, of course, like Hugo,’ Eleanor answered. That was safer ground. She did not object, for once, to Cook handing out iced biscuits to the little girls. They took their prizes and ran out into the garden before Eleanor could change her mind. Eleanor instructed Cook that the driver and the nurses who had accompanied the ambulance would probably require tea before returning to the hospital. Then she saw that Mrs Doyle had already put the kettle on the hot plate of the big black range. The kettle sighed and a wisp of steam issued from the curved spout. Eleanor nodded her satisfaction, and the two women smiled at each other. Their relationship was unconventional, but Eleanor did not run a conventional household. Mrs Doyle had been widowed in the first year of the war and had left her husband’s Oxfordshire village shortly afterwards to return to service. Before her marriage she had been employed as a parlourmaid in a great house, and had no experience in the kitchen. But Eleanor had lost a series of cooks who could not adapt to Madam’s haphazard housekeeping, and she was glad to offer the post to the capable-looking Mrs Doyle. Her instincts were correct. Mrs Doyle proved herself to be a naturally talented cook, producing the sweet cakes and pastries that Nathaniel loved as well as economical ragouts and vegetable pies, and managing to direct the shopping and weekly menus for the family whilst giving the impression that Eleanor was really in charge. Everyone ate much better food, and a new state of calm overtook the household. The secret of their relationship was not a secret between the two women. They felt a comfortable and open respect for one another, and as the war continued they also became friends. Mrs Doyle’s dependability freed Eleanor to concentrate on her convalescent nursing work, and as the time passed the Woodstock Road house became less a rest home than a hospital extension. By the beginning of 1918 the flow of casualties was so relentless that there were never enough hospital beds available. Eleanor and Nathaniel had begun to accept into the house men who were still seriously ill, simply because their taking a man who could be nursed at home meant that a bed was freed for another who could not. One trained and one volunteer nurse now came to the Woodstock Road every eight hours, in shifts around the clock, but it was still Eleanor who took responsibility for the recovery of her patients. They did recover, almost all of them had done, some with a rapidity that surprised the doctors. ‘You should have been a professional nurse,’ Nathaniel proudly told his wife. ‘You have a great gift for it.’ ‘Can you imagine my dear mama countenancing anything so dreary and dangerous? Permitting her daughters to do any work at all, however genteel?’ Eleanor sounded cheerful, but she was touched by a wistful sense of opportunity missed, of an unexperienced life running parallel to her own that she could only imagine, never know for sure. She consoled herself with the fact that she was doing what she could, now that it was needed, although it seemed so little. Nathaniel had laughed and refolded his newspaper. ‘I can not imagine,’ he had said. Eleanor and Mrs Doyle now had enough experience of both nurses and ambulance drivers to know that they needed tea, and slabs of cake as well. Mrs Doyle set out the plain white kitchen cups and cut a cherry cake into symmetrical pieces, and Eleanor welcomed Captain Dennis’s escorts into the kitchen. ‘Is he comfortably settled?’ ‘The journey’s taken it out of him, all right,’ one of the nurses said. ‘But I reckon he’ll do well enough when he’s rested himself.’ There was no ‘madam’. She spoke with a brusquely businesslike air, one professional to another. Eleanor noticed it and felt a mild satisfaction. Only Mrs Doyle frowned and held up the big brown teapot as if to threaten the woman with it. ‘Won’t you sit down, if you have time?’ Eleanor invited. They settled themselves around the scrubbed table, and Eleanor sat down with them. She took a cup of tea from Mrs Doyle and paid her a joking compliment about the even distribution of the cherries in the sponge. Only the driver stared and looked uncomfortable, but he was the only one who had never been to the Woodstock Road before. The nurses talked about patients and their prospects. Eleanor stayed just long enough to drink her tea, and then she said a smiling goodbye and went off upstairs to see if her newest patient was comfortable. ‘She’s the lady of the house, is she?’ the driver sniffed. ‘Funny sort of a set-up you’ve got here, the mistress sitting drinking tea with our sort, isn’t it?’ ‘More of a lady than you’re ever likely to encounter,’ the cook snapped. ‘And a finer household, too.’ The man appeared not to have heard her. He rubbed his whiskers with the palm of his hand. ‘It’s the war, isn’t it? Changing everything, all the old ways.’ He shook his head lugubriously, ready to insist that no change he had ever experienced had ever been for the better. Nathaniel came out of the Examination Schools and began to walk up the honey-walled curve of the High. He had been lecturing on Old French vowel-shifts and his mind was still busy with the fascinating labyrinths of word-formations and Germanic borrowings. It was the middle of the afternoon and Oxford was at its busiest, but Nathaniel was oblivious to the cyclists who swept past with their gowns fluttering, the tradesmen’s vans and carts and omnibuses and private cars that clogged the road, and even the fellow dons who passed in the opposite direction and glanced at him in the expectation of a greeting. He had forgotten to button up his overcoat and it flapped around his legs as he walked, but Nathaniel didn’t notice the cold wind either. If he had stopped to look around him it would have been to notice, with the same sadness even though it was for the thousandth time, that the faces of the undergraduates who swept by him were either too young, no more than boys, or else they were much older, and shadowed with experience. There were only one or two young men of the right age, and they were in khaki uniforms. Still preoccupied with his own thoughts, Nathaniel passed the golden front of Queen’s and hurried on, intending to cross Radcliffe Square in the direction of the Bodleian. But when he reached the corner of Catte Street he had to wait to allow a brewer’s dray to pass ahead of him, and while he stood hesitating something made him look sideways, across the High. Through the traffic he saw two young women. They were balanced on the edge of the kerb, one of them leaning on a bicycle, the other carrying a shopping basket. They were laughing, their heads held close together, and their rosy faces were bright with happiness. They looked very alike. His first response was abstract admiration. An instant later he thought of Eleanor and Blanche, with their lifelong conspiracy of friendship. These two reminded him of the older twins. And only then, emerging from his preoccupation, did he see that the two were not strangers at all, but Clio and Grace. He realized with a little shock that they were grown up, not children any longer. And as soon as the pair of faces dissolved into familiarity he lost the sense of how similar they were. Clio was wearing her school coat and a dark felt hat with a coloured ribbon, and her schoolbag was fastened to the front of her bicycle handlebars. Eleanor allowed her to cycle to school now, because Clio insisted that all the other girls did. By contrast, Grace wore one of the well-tailored suits that Blanche’s dressmaker made for her. From somewhere, probably her mother’s wardrobe, she had purloined a fur tippet and cut it up to make a turban. The fur made a dark cloud around her face. The shopping basket was an incongruous accessory. It looked very heavy. Nathaniel changed course and ducked through the passing traffic to greet them. They swung round at once with pleased cries of ‘Pappy!’ and ‘Uncle Nathaniel!’ ‘What’s the joke about?’ he asked, wanting instinctively to be a part of it. The girls looked blankly at him. ‘I don’t think there was a joke, really,’ Grace answered. ‘We were just laughing. I’ve been to the Lending Library. Look.’ The basket was full of books. It was one of Grace’s responsibilities to select novels for the patients. She chose out of the depths of her ignorance, with results that varied from inspired to comical. Nathaniel tilted his head to one side to read the titles on the spines. ‘Martin Chuzzlewit, mmm, mmm, Zuleika Dobson. That’s interesting. All very suitable. And where are the two of you going now?’ ‘Home. Unless we can come with you? Out to tea?’ Nathaniel had been planning to do some work in his rooms, but the idea of tea was tempting. Clio begged, ‘Please, pappy? Tea at Tripps’? You know it’s meatless day today. That means vegetable sausage for dinner, doesn’t it?’ The Hirsh household always obeyed the government’s edict for helping with food shortages by doing without meat on at least two days a week. But even Mrs Doyle’s version of the invariable vegetable sausage was no great favourite. ‘Tripps’ it is,’ Nathaniel said briskly. The tea-shop on the corner of the Broad was an old favourite. Nathaniel had first taken Eleanor there long ago, before Jake was born. The crooked floors of the little rooms and the dark oak furniture and faded yellowish walls seemed exactly as they had always been; the difference was that the cakes were brought by waitresses in caps and aprons, whereas there had once been waiters like family retainers in dark jackets with white napkins folded over their arms. Tripps’ appeared to be unaffected by food shortages. There were still tiny sandwiches cut into triangles and circlets, and chocolate roulade and ginger sponge and almond slices. Ceylon or China tea came in big silver-plated pots. ‘Heaven,’ Clio said greedily. Nathaniel had been eating and looking around the room. The tables were occupied by groups of pink-faced boys, by mature men, usually alone and absorbed in a book, and by young ladies from the women’s halls, always in pairs. Clio and Grace looked quite old enough to be one of those pairs, he thought, and then remembered that it was only another year or so before Clio would embark on her degree course. He was proud of her. When he finished his inspection of the room and looked back at their two faces he felt proud of both of them, the way they reflected each other, like two bright coins. He felt the same pleasure in their company as he had always done with Eleanor and Blanche. He was glad that the two of them seemed to have become such good friends. He would not have cared to place a bet on it when they were younger. ‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Grace invited. ‘I was thinking,’ Nathaniel teased, ‘that the two of you are almost as beautiful as your mothers.’ He was amused to see that they were both still young enough to look disbelieving, and then to blush fetchingly. Grace put her hands up to her hat, adjusting the fur cloud around her face. There was no echoing gesture from Clio in her old school felt. ‘Only almost?’ Grace had recovered herself. There was something so provocative in the curve of her mouth that Nathaniel was confused now by the dissimilarity between the two of them. Clio was still a little girl, Grace was not. He was pleased that Jake and Julius had gone on, out of the family circle. And Julius had survived his period of Grace-enchantment admirably well, Nathaniel thought. His music studies would give him enough to think about from now on. ‘As yet,’ Nathaniel answered. They had finished their tea. Nathaniel began to look forward to reaching home. He wanted to see Eleanor and to play for an hour with Alice. He loved his work, but the centre of his life was his wife and children. ‘Time to go,’ he announced. Grace and Clio might have hoped for more cake, but they knew Nathaniel better than to argue. When they stood up to leave, Nathaniel noticed how the men’s eyes followed Grace. Clio must have some proper clothes, he decided. He would talk to Eleanor about it. The three of them came out of the tea-shop into the greenish, fading afternoon light. Clio’s bicycle was propped against the wall nearby. ‘I’ll be home first,’ she called. ‘Lovely tea, pappy.’ She swung away from them towards Cornmarket. Nathaniel took Grace’s arm, and they began to walk. It was a long way along St Giles and up the Woodstock Road. So it happened that Clio was the first to meet Captain Dennis. She almost collided with Eleanor negotiating the stairs from the kitchen with a tea-tray. Clio took the tray from her mother automatically and Eleanor leant to kiss her cheek. ‘Hello, my darling. Will you take it up to the turret for me? Nelly and Ida are both so busy, and Grace is at the circulating library. Then come down and have some tea yourself.’ ‘We met Pappy. He took Grace and me to Tripps’.’ ‘Oh, how lucky.’ Eleanor was truly envious. She would have loved to sit in the tea-shop and gossip with her husband. Clio smiled at her, understanding as much. ‘Tell him to take you. Has someone new arrived?’ She nodded down at the tray. ‘The ambulance brought him this afternoon. His name is Captain Dennis. He was shot in the head, poor boy, but they say now that he will recover completely. Isn’t that marvellous?’ Eleanor was completely happy again, contemplating the good news. Peter had watched the light fading in the corners of the room, letting himself grow familiar with the opposite contours of square and semicircle, and then he had drifted into sleep. The soft knocking at the door woke him into momentary disorientation. ‘What is it?’ he called. ‘Clio Hirsh. I’ve brought your tea.’ ‘Come in,’ he said, not much the wiser. The door opened and he saw a dark-haired girl with wide eyes and pink cheeks. She came into the room sideways, carrying a tray of tea-things. She was not a nurse, or an orderly, although she was wearing some kind of uniform. Peter blinked, feeling the mists of confusion threatening him. A kind of convalescent home, they had told him before he left the hospital. He longed suddenly for his real home, and the sight of his mother, but they had also told him that Invernessshire was too far for him to travel yet. The girl set the tray down and then turned shyly to look at him. Peter saw that she was perhaps three years younger than himself. ‘I expect you wish you really could go home,’ she said. It was not a particularly profound insight, but in his weakness Peter was amazed and grateful. He had an uncomfortable moment when he was afraid that he might cry. He made himself smile instead. ‘It’s a very long way.’ Clio was gazing at him. One side of his head had been shaved, and where it was not hidden by the white lint dressing she could see the new growth of hair. It was a kind of fuzz, darker than the old hair. Apart from the red pucker of a healing scar that ran upwards from his cheekbone and under the pad of bandages, his face seemed undamaged. She wanted to look at his face, but she felt constrained by her shyness. She turned to the teatray instead, and found that her hands were shaking. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a very pretty sight.’ ‘I didn’t mean … It isn’t that.’ She couldn’t say that it was nothing, because he had suffered it, but it wasn’t his wound that she had been thinking about at all. ‘What happened to you?’ ‘I stuck my head above a parapet. A sniper got me. The bullet sliced a furrow through the bone. Missed my brain, more or less.’ Economical words, that was all. He wouldn’t tell her about the mud and the noise and the spectre of death, any more than he had told his father and mother when they came to see him in the Oxford hospital. That was past now, and he was alive. ‘What did you say your name was?’ ‘Clio Hirsh.’ She had a wonderful smile, and skin like ivory satin. Her throat was very white where it was swallowed by the collar of her severe blouse. He knew that he wanted to touch it. The strength of his inclination startled him. Clio felt his eyes on her, and put her hand up. ‘It’s my school uniform. I have to wear it. This, and the tunic.’ She was a schoolgirl. Peter Dennis’s schooldays, only two years behind him, seemed to belong to another lifetime. ‘You look very pretty in it.’ It was an unimaginative compliment, he thought, and Clio’s smile was more of a reward than it deserved. ‘Do you know, that is the second time today I have been told I look pretty?’ Peter tried to sit upright. ‘And who is the other man?’ ‘My father.’ It made her happy to see him laughing, and she laughed too. ‘Let me give you some tea,’ she said, when they had finished. She was going to hand him the cup when she saw that he had slipped down against the pillows. She leant over instead and rearranged them for him. Then she put her arm behind his shoulders. ‘Can you sit up some more?’ She lifted the weight of him, and his head rested against her for an instant. Looking down, she saw the line where his natural hair met the fuzzy new growth. She was suddenly aware of the eggshell vulnerability of the naked skull. It was terrible to think of the bullet smashing into it, the hairsbreadth distance from the soft brain. She felt a shiver of horror travelling through her limbs. Her awareness of her own body was immediately heightened. The business of muscles and tendons and blood vessels instantly struck her as precious and miraculous, all the more so for never having been considered before. She withdrew her arm, very carefully, aware of the infinitesimal warmth of their contact. Peter’s head flopped back against the plump pillows. ‘I’m so damned weak.’ ‘You will get strong again,’ she made herself say, with composure. She handed him the white and gold teacup. The mundane gesture was invested with importance. There was another knock at the door, and the day nurse came in. She was a square-jawed, middle-aged woman who wore a long starched apron and a cap of starched and folded linen. She was carrying the dressings box, and a tin jug of hot water. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Hirsh. How are you, Captain Dennis? It’s time for your dressing.’ Clio knew that she was dismissed. She was disappointed, but she nodded meekly. ‘Goodbye, Captain.’ He ignored the nurse. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Will you come back tomorrow?’ Clio gave him her smile once more. ‘Of course I will.’ Only when the door had closed behind her did he lean back, ready to submit. The nurse bent over him, crackling, and began to peel the old dressing away from the weeping furrow in the side of his skull. Nathaniel and Grace were home. Clio could hear Tabby and Alice clamouring for their father’s attention. Grace was coming swiftly up the stairs. She glanced up and saw Clio hovering at the top, as if she had a secret. ‘What is it?’ Grace called. Clio had been thinking dazedly that here was a man, a man who was neither a brother or a cousin. She had met hardly any men except the other patients, and she knew with certainty that Peter Dennis was absolutely unlike any of those. ‘Nothing,’ Clio answered innocently. Grace came up the stairs, and stopped on the stair level with her. ‘What’s the new patient like?’ ‘Quite nice, I think.’ She went on down, with every appearance of calm, and left Grace on the landing. It was the next afternoon, when Clio was at school, before Grace met Peter Dennis. She was making a visit to each of the patients, distributing the new books she had brought home in her basket. The turret room was the highest in the house and the last one she came to. When she came in Peter saw her dark hair and eyes, and remembered the colour of her skin. There was a faint blur of light around her silhouette, but he knew that was a trick played by his own damaged eyesight. He smiled at her. ‘Clio? I hoped you’d come today.’ Grace saw that he moved his legs a little to one side under the white covers, in the expectation that she would sit down beside him. The intimacy of the small gesture struck her first, and then came a tide of other impressions. She saw that he was good-looking, even though his head was bandaged and partly shaven, and she felt disappointed that Clio had claimed his friendship first. She understood at once that he had eagerly mistaken her for Clio, and it was a ferment of mischief and pique and residual boredom that made her smile back and answer, ‘Of course I have come.’ As she said it she sat down on the bed, in the space his long legs had made for her. She was remembering the stories that Blanche and Eleanor used to tell of confusions at evening parties when they were girls. Her smile widened, and grew brillant. Peter Dennis was dazzled by it. ‘It’s my job to go to the library and bring back books. You must tell me what you like to read. I’m afraid there’s only one left today.’ ‘What is it?’ He had been unable to read for a long time. The print blurred and ran down the page like tears, and made pain slice through his head. But now he felt that he wanted to read again. He would have liked the volume of Tennyson that had been in his tunic pocket. Grace held out the book. ‘It’s Zuleika Dobson.’ ‘I’ve read it,’ Peter said. And then he added, ‘But I would love to read it again.’ This was Zuleika, he thought lightheadedly, sitting on his bed with a rainbow around her hair. He knew that he would happily throw himself into the river for her sake. ‘Do you know the story?’ Grace hesitated. She did not, but she had no doubt that Clio did. It would not be easy, passing herself off as her cousin. The challenge enticed her. ‘Not very well,’ she hedged. ‘Zuleika is the most beautiful girl in the world. All the young men in Oxford drown themselves in the river for love of her.’ Their eyes met. ‘How stupid of them,’ Grace said softly. ‘What a waste.’ In the moment’s silence that followed there was nothing for Peter to do but lift her hand from where it lay on the bedcover. He turned it in his own, examining the fingers, the dimples over the knuckles and the knob of bone at the wrist. It seemed extraordinary that this girl should be here, with her clean apple-scented skin and shiny hair, extraordinary that he should be here himself, in this room that smelt of lavender and fresh linen and polished oak boards. He wondered if he would wake up and find himself lying in a shell-hole, the sky over his head blackened with smoke. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. Grace was looking steadily at him. ‘Are you tired? Does your head hurt?’ Her voice had turned gentle. ‘No. I’m not tired.’ He lifted her hand and held the palm of it against his lips. As if drawn by an invisible thread, Grace leant towards him. She leant closer, until her cheek rested against his head. She could feel the silky texture of his natural hair and the rougher prickle of the new growth. She rubbed her cheek, turning her head so that her mouth was against his skull, and her chest seemed to tighten and expel the breath out of her lungs in a ragged sigh. He said, ‘Clio,’ and she was startled because she had forgotten the deception. To exclude it once more she drew her hand back, away from his mouth, and put her own lips in its place. Peter breathed in sharply, but then when her mouth opened a little he tasted the slippery heat of her tongue. He put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her so close to him that he could feel her small breasts against his chest. He pushed his tongue between her teeth, his own mouth widening. He was thirsty, and ravenously hungry. Grace thought, What did Clio do yesterday? It came to her that she didn’t know her cousin nearly as well as she had thought, and then that for now she was Clio, looking out from inside her. Or controlling her from above, like a puppet. The notion was intriguing, and oddly exciting. It was more exciting than what was actually happening to her. Grace didn’t feel frightened by Captain Dennis, not in the way that Jake had frightened her with his furtive desperation. She felt pleasantly alive, and stimulated by his kisses, without being afraid that she might not be able to control him, or understand her own response. She knew what she felt about this. She enjoyed being kissed by the damaged hero, she liked the way that he seemed to give himself up to her, with blind concentration. She was relieved to find now the first surprise was over that she felt cool, almost detached. She reached up and stroked back his hair, away from the stark white dressing. Had Clio done the same thing yesterday? When Peter opened his eyes her face was momentarily shot into bright and dark fragments, prism-edged, like broken mirror-shards. He waited for the visual disturbance to subside and her features reassembled themselves. For another instant there was a complete image but it was a double one, so that he saw two of her. Then the dark heads slid together and coalesced, and she was smiling at him, soft-lipped. They were both panting a little. ‘You are really here, aren’t you?’ he asked. For answer she held out her two hands for him to take. They were warm and quite solid. He kissed the knuckles of each one in turn. ‘I can’t believe you,’ he said delightedly. ‘You are a miracle.’ ‘If I were a miracle, I wouldn’t have to go now and do the tea-trays.’ Clio would be home soon. He was anxious immediately. ‘Will you come back again?’ ‘Of course I will. When I can.’ After she had gone, Peter Dennis lay back against his pillows and slipped into an erotic reverie of the kind he had not had for two years. Love and sex had been a part of the old world, the one he had exchanged for the trenches. He was astonished to find that he could re-enter the old kingdom so easily. And in her turn Grace might have been amused to know that Peter’s imaginings were set in an idyllic water-meadow backed by a hawthorn hedge. When the starched nurse came in she looked sharply at her patient and then pronounced, ‘You are looking very much better, Captain Dennis.’ ‘I am feeling very much better, nurse, thank you,’ Peter agreed with her. Clio came home from school, bumping her bookbag down on the console table in the hall and sending the cards and papers piled on it whirling to the floor. ‘I’ve so much work to do. Miss Muldoon is a tyrant, a vile tyrant. I wanted to be free on Saturday, and now I shall have to plough through a thousand pages of Racine. You’re so lucky, Grace, you just don’t know.’ ‘I’ll do your chores for you, if you like,’ Grace offered. Saturday was important. It was Alice’s sixth birthday, and there would be a family party. Jake and Julius were coming home for it. Clio’s face lightened. ‘Will you, really? If I go straight up and start on it now, I might just finish it by Friday. You are a true friend, Gracie. I’ll remember you in my will.’ Grace had been intending to confide in her. She had imagined that they would enjoy the mischief of the confusion together, playing at being one another as Eleanor and Blanche had done in the ballrooms twenty years before. But she watched Clio unpacking her books, and said nothing. Clio could play at being Grace, of course, as easily as she could play at being Clio. There was a different, darker satisfaction in keeping the secret just for herself. Clio was preoccupied with her languages, busy and productive, while Grace had no such focus. The image of the puppeteer manipulating the strings came back to her. There was a moment when she could have said, Something quite funny happened when I took a book in to Captain Dennis. Then the moment was gone. ‘Here I go,’ Clio sighed. ‘I’ll bring you up something to eat when I’ve done the trays.’ Clio blew her a kiss from the foot of the stairs. Grace did the extra work with an assiduity that made Nelly and Ida exchange surprised glances behind her back. Later, when the girls were preparing for bed, Clio asked, ‘Have you met the new patient yet? Captain Dennis?’ Grace concentrated on her own reflection in the looking glass as she brushed her hair. She shook her head. Clio was smiling, wanting to offer something, a confidence, in exchange for Grace’s earlier generosity. ‘He’s … interesting. Rather beautiful, in a way.’ ‘The damaged hero, you mean? Another one.’ ‘Oh, no. Not another, not at all. He is quite different.’ In the glass Grace saw that there was warm colour over Clio’s throat and cheeks, and her eyes were shining. Clio was ready to fall in love, and Grace felt the allure of responsive strings in her fingers. The temptation was too strong to resist. The chance to influence Clio’s love affair more than compensated for not having a love of her own. Grace didn’t think beyond that. For two or three days, until Alice’s birthday, she enjoyed the challenges of her complicated game. Clio’s attention was torn between the books waiting on her desk and the turret room. For the first time in her life she experienced the thrill of neglecting what she was supposed to do and indulging in what she was not. She would wait in agony for what she judged to be the safest moment, then quietly close up her grammar and slip through the shadowy house to Peter’s door. He would look up when she came in, with a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty, and when she sat on the edge of the bed he would put his arms up around her neck and draw her down beside him. Sometimes they would kiss; more often they would lie quite still, their mouths just touching, talking in whispers. Clio told him everything, about Jake and Julius and their childhoods, about Blanche and Eleanor and their different marriages, and Stretton and what had happened to Hugo, and about Grace. ‘Why haven’t I seen Grace yet?’ Peter asked once. ‘I think she’s piqued because I’ve claimed you for my own,’ Clio said, not pursuing the topic. She was quite happy for Grace to keep her distance. At other times, Peter would begin to talk about the war. From the way his words came, reluctantly but inevitably, Clio understood that he could never close his mind to what he had seen and done. He tried to obliterate it, but he could not. She felt it always there, a long shadow between them. Sometimes he would remember the men in his company, recalling their jokes and their idiosyncrasies and smiling at the memory so that he looked much younger, the boy that he must have been. Almost always, it seemed, these reminiscences ended with Peter saying, ‘He was killed, not long after that.’ ‘What was it really like?’ Clio asked once, her whisper almost inaudible. There was a silence before he answered her. Then he said, ‘Like nothing you should ever know about.’ He turned her face between his hands, so that he could look into her eyes. It was difficult for him to focus on her face, so close to his. He could see the dark fringe of her eyelashes, the glint of reflected light in her pupils. Her breath was warm and sweet. He felt in this safe place that he was bathed in happiness, like sunshine. ‘I love you,’ he told her. ‘I love you too,’ Clio breathed. Grace had to plan her own visits with even more care. She watched and waited, and then flitted like a shadow up the stairs and passageways that led to the turret: she had to avoid the nurses, and Eleanor on her rounds, and Nelly and Ida with their clanking hot-water jugs, and Clio herself. The best time was the quiet middle of the afternoon, when Eleanor was resting in her bedroom and the maids had retired to sit with Cook in the kitchen. The nurses withdrew too, to what had once been the housekeeper’s parlour at the back of the house, where they could be summoned by an ancient system of brass bells if any of the patients needed them. On the first afternoon Grace had thought of putting on one of Clio’s school tunics, but she dismissed the idea as too difficult to explain away if anyone else in the household should catch sight of her. She made do with a plain linen blouse and flannel skirt, and she plaited her hair in a long braid, like Clio’s. ‘Don’t you have to go to school? It is a weekday, isn’t it? Or have I lost count?’ Peter asked in puzzlement. ‘It’s Wednesday, all day,’ Grace laughed. ‘I’m supposed to be working at home. Preparing for examinations.’ She changed the subject quickly, not eager to be questioned too closely about which examinations. She quickly discovered that it was easier not to talk very much at all. There were too many potential pitfalls in conversation. She stretched out beside him instead, measuring her supple length against him. And at the beginning, he was a willing participant. He was even the leader in their explorations of one another. Peter was a virgin, technically. But there had been a girl at home, the daughter of one of the tenant farmers on his father’s estate. In the summer after he had left school, before he joined his new regiment, the girl had taken a fancy to him. He could still remember the smell of dust and saddle soap and horse sweat exuded by the blanket that they spread on the floor of the barn loft, and see the dreamy, intent expression on the girl’s face as she unbuttoned his clothes and took hold of him with her cool hand. ‘Please,’ he had begged her. ‘Please, let me.’ ‘No-o,’ she whispered. ‘I darena’. What would I do wi’ a babby?’ ‘I’ll be careful,’ he said in his innocence. The girl only giggled. ‘For sure you will. But I’ll not let you, whatever. Look, this is what you do. It feels just as good, I tell you.’ She had guided his hand until his fingers slipped in the silky wetness and rubbed against a hard nub of flesh. She had stretched out on the blanket then, with her skirts up around her waist, exposing her thin white legs and a patch of dark red hair. She had closed her eyes, sighing and lifting her narrow hips under his hand. It seemed to Peter that she took her pleasure and achieved satisfaction with the same uncomplicated innocence as the cats in the farmyard. ‘That’s right,’ she said afterwards. ‘Now I do it for you, see?’ She did, with quick, businesslike strokes, and he groaned when the milky jet spurted over the blanket to lie in glistening clots between their bodies. Peter knew that it was not as good as burying himself inside her, but it was good enough. There were variations, too, they discovered together before it was time for him to leave for France. Part of him longed to rediscover all those variations with this miraculous Clio. When she wasn’t with him he thought of it constantly. But when she did come to his room he was immediately and painfully conscious of every creak and whisper in the old house, imagining a footstep outside the door, voices intruding on them, staring eyes and shocked exclamations. ‘What’s the matter?’ Grace whispered. ‘Don’t you like it when I do this?’ ‘I like it too much,’ he answered, half-ashamed. She was much braver than he was, much more reckless. She seemed to have no fears of discovery. Her hand brushed against him, and he felt that it was hot through the thin sheet. Peter had begun to be puzzled. He admired her, he was captivated by her in all her moods, but he was confused by her capriciousness. Sometimes when she came she was demure, even shy, seemingly happier to lie in his arms and whisper disarming confidences than to touch and tease. She said, I love you, and he believed her. And then at other times she was evasive, except in the matter of her thin, smooth body. The heat in her seemed almost febrile. He would follow her lead and then he would shiver with the fear that someone would come in and discover them. If he told her he loved her then she would only smile, and look at him from beneath her dark eyelashes. He felt more comfortable with her innocent, confiding manner, but it was the other one he dreamt of when he was alone. He lay in his room and for all his satisfaction otherwise his thoughts circled around the mystery of it, as if he could not keep his tongue away from an aching tooth. At last he said to her, when she slipped into the turret room on Friday evening. ‘Wicked Clio, today, is it?’ Clio was in her bedroom, finishing her translation. Alice was being put to bed in a state of furious over-excitement, and the rest of the household was preparing for the birthday party and the arrival of Jake and Julius. Grace had stretched out full-length on the bed beside Peter, her head propped on one hand. Unusually, her hair was loose and a strand of it lay across Peter’s shoulder. She hesitated only for an instant. Then she looked full at him. ‘What can you mean by that?’ she asked, in her teasing voice. ‘I am never wicked.’ His eyes met hers. She saw that he was serious. ‘You know what I mean.’ Grace had sensed his confusion, almost from the moment he had become aware of it himself. She had understood that whatever it was that Clio and Peter did or talked about together, it was different from what she did. She was not finding out what it was like to be Clio, only setting herself further apart from her. She was not directing anything, and she had no power at all. She was simply involved in a mean and sordid piece of trickery. The realization had made her feel miserable and defiant. It was worse because she had grown to like Peter Dennis, and to wish that he might like her for herself, rather than for her inept version of Clio. She wondered now if she had said or done something obviously wrong, or omitted to do something else, and so given away her wretched secret. She had already decided that it was time to stop her visits. She would change her clothes and give herself an elaborate coiffure, and re-introduce herself as Grace. If it was not already too late. She answered warily, ‘I don’t think I do know.’ She saw that he hadn’t guessed, but that he must do soon. Peter sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter, then.’ Grace sat up. ‘I’d better go. Mama needs help downstairs.’ He held her wrist then, unwilling to let her go in either of her incarnations. ‘Stay.’ He wanted to force her back against the white pillows, shutting out her life that he didn’t know beyond the door of the turret room. He wanted her to belong to him, with all her inconsistencies. A little of Grace’s confidence flooded back. She did have her own power that was nothing to do with Clio. She had learnt that from Jake and Julius. ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ she promised. One last time, she told herself. She leant over and kissed him, and for a moment the dark veil of her hair obscured the light. In the morning Clio said happily, ‘I’m so looking forward to you meeting my brothers.’ She had brought his breakfast tray. Instead of her school uniform she was wearing her best dress, hyacinth-blue cr?pe de Chine with the faint traces of an ink stain in the front panel of the skirt. The bodice had slightly too many fussy ruches and pleats, but Peter thought she looked beautiful. He wanted to reach out for her, but the morning nurse was bustling in and out with her thermometer and hot water. They contented themselves with touching hands when her back was turned. ‘I’m looking forward to it too,’ he said. Clio had talked a lot about her brothers. He knew that Jake had finally been invalided home from a hospital in France, suffering from pneumonia and exhaustion. He was a medical student now, at University College in London. He knew about Julius the violinist, too. Clio talked less about her twin, but he guessed that it was because there was a closeness between the two of them that went deeper than words. He was particularly curious to meet Julius Hirsh. While they were talking, they could hear Alice’s high-pitched voice rising excitedly through the house. Now she materialized in the open doorway and blinked at Peter. Her springy black curls had been pulled back into a tight braid, and her round face suddenly looked older. ‘I’m six,’ she said importantly. ‘My cousin Grace did my hair grown-up for me. It’s my birthday.’ ‘I know it is. May I wish you many happy returns of the day?’ Alice had firm likes and dislikes, not always logically based. She included Peter amongst her likes. ‘Thank you. Did you buy me a present?’ Clio remonstrated. ‘Alice!’ but Peter held up his hand. ‘I am afraid I didn’t. It isn’t very easy for me to buy presents, lying here like this.’ ‘Pappy and Mama gave me a dolls’ house. With furniture.’ ‘I see. Is there a dog kennel?’ ‘Of course not.’ ‘All dolls’ houses need a dog to guard them, and a kennel for him to live in. I will carve you one. I happen to be a very fine wood-carver.’ Alice beamed. ‘That would be very kind of you.’ A moment later she was gone. It delighted Clio that her love was generous to her little sister. He had told her that he had two younger sisters of his own, at home in Scotland. She liked to think of him as part of a family, belonging to a warm nexus like her own. She looked at him now, with the nurse bending over him and the asymmetrical crest of his hair spread out on the pillow, and thought that she had never felt happier in her life than she had done since Peter Dennis had come. ‘What time will your brothers be here?’ ‘On the eleven o’clock train from Town. Pappy will go to the station to meet them.’ Peter heard the excitement of the arrival. He was alone, watching the progress of the squares of sunlight across the polished floor. Then he heard the chugging of a taxicab, and running feet and excited voices. Alice’s shrill cries were the most clearly audible, but it sounded as if the entire household had spilt out of the front door and down the steps to greet the returning sons. After the hubbub was over and the house had swallowed the voices up once more, it was a long, slow hour and more before Peter heard them coming along the passage to his room. He sat up against his pillows, watching the door. Clio was the first to appear, with pink cheeks and bright eyes, as he had first seen her. She was followed by two tall young men who had to stoop to pass under the door lintel. Peter’s first impression, born out of his upper-class Anglo-Scots prejudice, was that they looked large and strange and exotic, unmistakable Jewish. He had noticed none of this strangeness in Clio. The two young men were like their huge, black-bearded father, and Clio took after her aristocratic mother. But then, when they came closer to shake his hand, he saw the strength of the family likeness. It was especially marked between Clio and Julius. It was as if the addition of her brothers made him see Clio afresh, in a different context. Her duality seemed less puzzling, then. Jake was friendly and direct. He sat on the end of the bed and talked to Peter about where he had been fighting, and about his injuries and recovery. Julius was quieter. Peter noticed that his wrists protruded from the sleeves of his coat, and that his hands were long and pale with broad, spatulate tips to the fingers. He asked if Peter played chess and diffidently offered to give him a game, later, after the birthday party. Clio looked from one to the other of the three faces, with a mixture of pride and anxiety. It seemed very important that they should all like one another. Eleanor called them. ‘Jacob! I need you to help to move this table. Why is poor Grace left to do all the work?’ They stood up obediently. ‘Can’t you come down and join the party?’ Julius asked. ‘Peter’s eyesight is affected, he has to keep still, the doctors won’t let …’ Clio broke off, blushing, knowing that she had betrayed her loving concern. Her brothers grinned. ‘Next time,’ Peter said, smiling at her. ‘But I would like to meet Grace. To complete the set.’ He saw, in the three faces, three different reactions to her name. Julius’s was the least ambivalent. ‘You will,’ Clio promised. ‘I’ll make her come up.’ Alice sat the head of the long table. She was wearing her best white muslin dress and a crown that Tabby had made for her out of gold paper. Tabby was always happier to celebrate other people’s birthdays than to be the focus of attention on her own. Nathaniel and Eleanor sat on her right and left hands, and down the length of the table were the Hirsh children, Julius and Jake vying with each other to make Alice laugh and encouraging her to an even higher pitch of excitement, three or four little girls who were Alice’s friends and who stared at her brothers with big, round eyes, and Oswald Harris and his wife and children. Grace sat at the far end, facing Alice. On the white linen cloth there were the remains of jewel-coloured jellies and iced cakes, with ribbons and favours and fondant sweets. Grace watched Mrs Doyle come in with the birthday cake. It was chocolate and cream, with a ruff of the same gold paper as Alice’s crown. Nathaniel beamed with paternal pleasure as Alice seized the bone-handled knife from Mrs Doyle. He looked across the table at his wife, celebrating in the exchanged glance another year of family life, Jake’s safe return and recovery, the quiet continuation of the domestic happiness. ‘My cake! I cut it,’ Alice shouted. Grace thought that she could not stomach much more of this joyful family harmony. In a little while there would be singing, and then noisy party games. Just for the moment, she had had enough of Hirsh good humour and wholesome merrymaking. Birthdays and family occasions at Stretton and Belgrave Square were more sombre, restrained events. This party, today, made her feel rebellious and contrary. She pushed her chair back, and slipped away from the table, murmuring an inaudible excuse. Only Julius saw her go. It was pleasant to be out of the overheated room. She wandered slowly up the stairs. The upper part of the house was cool and silent. She came to the door of the turret room, and gently pushed it open. Peter was asleep. Grace stood beside the bed, looking down at him. He was rather beautiful, she thought. He looked like a marble knight on a tomb. She had to lean down, until her face almost touched his, before she could hear the faint sigh of his breathing. Grace smiled suddenly. She wanted to warm the cold marble and bring the effigy to life. It was her last visit. She had no idea, still, what it was like to be Clio, and she understood that the notion was ridiculous. After this she would be Grace entirely. But for now, in this hour while Alice’s party went on downstairs, she felt that she was anonymous. She reached up to the buttons that fastened the neck of her dress. It was her best afternoon dress, silk in tiny stripes of lavender and cream. She undid the pearl buttons, and the dress rustled down around her ankles. Grace stepped away from it, feeling the cool air on her bare arms and shoulders. She lifted the bedcovers and Peter stirred in his sleep. Grace lay down beside him, and drew the covers over them both. Then she turned to him and put her arm around his neck. She felt that her own body was a matter of soft curves and recesses, whereas Peter’s was all bone and sharp angles. She let her breath warm his cheek, and then she reached with the tip of her tongue to the corner of his mouth. Peter opened his eyes and looked directly into hers. She was afraid that he could see straight through into her head. As soon as he woke up, Peter knew that it was not Clio in his bed. This girl did not look like Jake and Julius. She was rounder, fuller-lipped, more English. There was a dress lying on the floor, in shadow now but where he had watched the square of light move that morning, and it was not Clio’s hyacinth blue. Peter was used to dreams, to apparitions that were more vivid than dreams. This one was as welcome as the others were unwelcome. He didn’t try to talk, or to define the mysterious boundary between sleeping and waking. He put his arm around her waist, and his mouth against her bare shoulder. ‘Zuleika,’ he whispered. Outside in the Woodstock Road a car drew up. It was a dark green Bullnose Morris, driven by a young man in flying goggles and leather gauntlets. He jumped from the driver’s seat and strolled around to open the door for his passenger, another young man. The passenger put one hand on the driver’s shoulder and carefully negotiated the high step to the ground. Then he held on to the polished chrome door handle while his friend took a pair of wooden crutches from behind the seats and fitted them under his armpits. ‘Very good of you, Farmy,’ Hugo said. ‘Won’t you come in and have a drink? My aunt and uncle will be glad to see you.’ ‘No, thanks all the same, Culmington. Little girls’ birthday parties are not quite my m?tier. Big girls’ quite different, of course. Let me just see you to the door, won’t you?’ Hugo moved quickly on his crutches. One leg of his flannel trousers, empty, was rolled up and pinned neatly just below the knee. He was already ringing the bell when Farmiloe held up a parcel. ‘Don’t forget the present. Enjoy yourself.’ Nelly opened the front door. Through the open drawing-room door beyond Hugo could see a line of cushions, and a dozen pairs of flying feet. Someone was thumping out a Strauss waltz on the piano. The games were in progress. ‘Hugo, Hugo.’ Alice saw him first. Musical bumps were abandoned as the Hirshes came flooding out into the hall. ‘Happy birthday, miss.’ Alice was a favourite of Hugo’s. He held the present above her head, so she had to jump for it. ‘Be careful, Alice,’ Eleanor scolded. ‘Hugo, this is wonderfully good of you.’ ‘I’m not an invalid, Aunt Eleanor, I don’t know about good. College tea is a poor show on Saturdays. Is there anything left?’ Grace and Peter did not hear the new arrival. They only heard the rasp of one another’s breathing, and the rustle of clothes, and the small squeak of the iron bedstead. They could not have heard Hugo asking, ‘Where’s Grace? Not in a sulk, somewhere, is she?’ But if they had been listening they would have heard the quick clicking of Eleanor’s heels as she came along the linoleum corridor. She had not been able to find Grace in the garden, nor in her bedroom, so she could not have retired with a headache. The only possibility was that she had looked in to see if any of the patients needed anything. Eleanor was thinking that it was considerate of her, with the rest of the household so busy elsewhere. When it opened, the door seemed to admit a wedge of cold blue light into the room. Peter felt it touch him, and freeze him. Eleanor stood in the coldness of it, staring at them in silence, for what seemed an eternity. ‘Grace.’ He understood then, but only then. ‘Nemesis was swift and awful,’ Jake said afterwards. He was the only one of them who could joke about it; even much later. For Julius, it was the time when he began to understand that he was a spectator in Grace’s concerns, not a participant. Grace was sent back to London, to Blanche, in the deepest disgrace. She spent the remainder of the year, until the war ended, yoked to a series of chaperones and fulfilling a round of charity work and visits with her mother. She always claimed thereafter that those months were the most miserable of her life. Peter Dennis returned to the hospital, and Nathaniel wrote a stiffly worded letter to his commanding officer. Before the ambulance came to take him away, defiant and dry-eyed Grace managed to insinuate herself into his room for the last time. She was supposed to be folding linen in a cubbyhole downstairs, but she had walked through the house with her head held up and no one had come out to intercept her. ‘I wanted to say goodbye,’ she told him. ‘Even though we haven’t been properly introduced.’ Peter stared at her in incomprehension. He could not imagine what it was that drove Grace to pretend carelessness, even comedy, when he could see that she was miserable. He was wondering how what had seemed with Clio to be innocent and natural should have become a matter for shame and public humiliation, because of Grace. He felt ashamed when he remembered what he had done with this mutinous girl, letting himself believe that she was Clio. ‘I suppose the gentlemanly course would be to ask you to marry me.’ He thought sentimentally of marrying Clio, the impossible outcome. Grace gave a harsh spurt of laughter. ‘I’m not ready to marry anyone yet. I’m sorry.’ ‘Don’t feel that you should apologize.’ Grace didn’t seem to flinch. She held out her hand. ‘Won’t you say goodbye?’ There was something determined about her, a toughness that he disliked but could not deny. At last he held out his hand in return. Grace shook it, and then turned without another word and went back to folding the linen, waiting for her father’s chauffeur to come and take her away. In the hours before the ambulance arrived Peter waited and wished, but Clio didn’t come. It was Clio who suffered most. She could not bring herself to go up to the turret room again, imagining Grace there. She didn’t want to see her brothers’ sympathetic, speculative expressions, or her mother’s anxiety, or Nathaniel’s disappointment. She wanted to be with Peter as they had been before Alice’s birthday party, and that possibility was gone for ever. She sat in her bedroom, listening to the timid sounds of the shocked household, until Grace came. No one overheard what passed between Clio and Grace before the chauffeur came, and neither of them ever talked of it afterwards. It was Clio’s anger that made Grace realize the final absurdity of having tried to imitate her. She had expected tears or temper, but nothing like the bitter fury that Clio turned on her. For all their seventeen years together, she had never properly known her cousin. ‘You have to have everything, don’t you?’ Clio had whispered. Her eyes were like black holes in her white face. ‘You have to take everything for yourself. You don’t really want it, because you don’t know what you want, but you can’t bear anything to belong to someone else. ‘That was how it was with Jake and Julius, wasn’t it? Not loving them for themselves, but just demonstrating that you could have them, mesmerize them.’ Grace tried to laugh. ‘I’m not a hypnotist.’ But Clio’s cold face froze her. ‘No. You’re a liar, a deceiver. And you saw what I felt about Peter, so you had to wreck it, didn’t you?’ ‘Clio, that’s not true. He mistook me for you. I thought it would be like Blanche and Eleanor, when they were girls. It was a way of being closer to you …’ There was too little time, and Grace knew at once that the hasty elision of what she had really felt was the wrong explanation. Clio spat at her. ‘You are not close to me. I hate you, Grace. I want to kill you.’ Grace faltered. ‘No, you don’t. I did something stupid and thoughtless, and I regret it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ Clio shook her head. The anger inside her seemed to expand, stretching taut the skin of her face, tightening her scalp over her skull. The blood throbbed behind her eyes, and she wanted to reach out her fingers to Grace’s throat, to squeeze the soft, startled smile off her face. In a small smothered voice she said, ‘After all this time. After living here, with us. I hate you. I could easily kill you.’ Grace’s own anger rose up in response. ‘Living here? With you complacent, condescending Hirshes? Who are you, after all? What do you know?’ ‘Go away, Grace. Go away now, before I hit you.’ Clio ran across the room, and flung the door open. Ida the housemaid’s frightened face was revealed on the other side, her hand raised to knock. ‘The car is here, Lady Grace,’ Ida mumbled. From her window, Clio watched Grace’s boxes being stowed in the dicky. She didn’t move until Grace had taken her seat, stiff-backed, until the chauffeur had closed the door on her and swung his starting handle, until the car had rolled away and out of sight down the length of the Woodstock Road. Two hours later, from the same place, she saw Peter’s wheelchair rolled up the ramp into the high-sided ambulance. She didn’t know where they were taking him. Six weeks later, a small parcel came addressed to Alice. Inside it was a tiny carved dog kennel, and a miniature china cocker spaniel. A single line on an otherwise blank sheet of paper wished Alice a belated happy birthday. There was no address. After some thought, Eleanor and Nathaniel allowed Alice to keep her present. No letter came for Clio. She would have written to him if she could, she wrote a thousand letters in her head, but she never put one down on paper. She knew that Captain Dennis would rather forget what had happened in the turret room. Six (#u2bf208d7-2a0d-5ee2-b00e-16756161e98b) Julius fastened the bow of his white tie and spread the butterfly ends between the points of his starched collar. He pulled down his white waistcoat and then shrugged himself into his tailcoat. The coat had once belonged to Nathaniel, who had distinctly broader shoulders, but the length of it at least was approximately right. Eleanor had told him to take the coat to a tailor, but Julius had answered that he was perfectly happy with it as it was, and he didn’t want to spend time waiting in a fitting room like some d?butante. ‘When I make my concert d?but,’ he told her, ‘then you can kit me out with new evening clothes.’ He inspected himself briefly in the wardrobe mirror, noting the unfamiliarly brilliantined hair and patent leather slippers, and turned away without interest. His violin was lying in its open case on the table and he took it up and ran his finger across the strings. Julius sighed. The prospect ahead of him was less inviting than a concert. He was on his way to Clio’s and Grace’s coming-out dance at Belgrave Square. Downstairs, at the end of the narrow brown-linoleum hallway, the doorbell rang. Julius laid his violin in its plush nest once more, draped a white silk scarf around his neck and went out, locking the door of his rented rooms behind him. On the landing he met the woman who lived opposite, a thirtyish redhead who worked at some job with very irregular hours. She raised her eyebrows when she saw him. ‘Well, look at you. Proper dandy.’ Julius blushed. The woman was always too interested in his comings and goings, but she didn’t mind his practising and he didn’t want to antagonize her. ‘It’s my sister’s dance.’ The doorbell rang again, more insistently. ‘Off you go and enjoy yourself, then.’ She watched him as he went down the stairs, admiring his height and the nape of his neck above his starched collar. Julius’s friend Armstrong was standing on the step, and there were two other music students, Vaughan and Zuckerman, waiting in Zuckerman’s car. Zuckerman gave an impatient hee-haw on the car’s bulb horn when he saw Julius emerge. Julius and Armstrong scrambled into the back seat and they bowled away towards Belgrave Square. There was a short line of taxicabs and chauffeured private cars outside the house. Julius caught a glimpse of Hugo limping up the steps with his friend Farmiloe, and an ancient Earley aunt moving like a tortoise in their wake. Her Victorian tiara was slightly askew on her thin white hair. He marshalled his own trio of guests with a sense of duty rather than anticipation. Armstrong was his friend, a thin, studious and very young man with a weak chest, but he didn’t know the other two particularly well. Vaughan was much older, wore a black moustache, and had a mysterious private life. Zuckerman was a talented flautist. He had a rich father and an enigmatic expression heightened by spectacles so thick-lensed they were almost opaque. Julius had invited the three of them to his sister’s dance because Eleanor had begged him to. ‘It will be a disaster,’ she had sighed. ‘There are no young men, none at all. Whom will the girls dance with?’ ‘I don’t know. Is it important?’ It seemed to Julius that a shortage of dancing partners for Clio and Grace was hardly the most serious consequence of the war. ‘Of course it is important. When your Aunt Blanche and I came out we danced with everyone, even the old Prince of Wales.’ ‘Yes, of course.’ Julius had heard the story enough times. ‘Then be a lamb, and ask some of your student friends, won’t you? You must know lots of nice young men.’ He had done his best, but the forlorn group in Belgrave Square now seemed hardly adequate. Zuckerman had pulled a silver flask out of his pocket and swallowed a long gulp. He winked at Julius as he screwed the cap on again. ‘Over the top and into the fray, then.’ Blanche’s butler opened the door to them. ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he muttered with the utmost gloom. Julius gave a silent prayer of thanks that he had resisted all Blanche’s invitations to bring his friends to the family dinner before the dance, and let himself be carried forward into the ball. As soon as they entered the ballroom Julius hesitated in the doorway and quartered the room with his eyes. He always looked for Grace first. Only then, when he had caught a brief glimpse of her, could he turn his attention to other people. Tonight, peering through the crowd, he could only see men with red faces, dowdy chaperones, and girls in white dresses anxious with their dance cards, none of them Grace. The room was already hot, and the dancing had only just begun. Julius could feel Zuckerman and Vaughan crowding up behind him. Armstrong stood to one side, hooking his index finger down inside his stiff collar, a sure sign that he was nervous and uncomfortable. Julius couldn’t see Grace anywhere. ‘Come and meet my mother and my aunt,’ Julius said, reluctantly abandoning his search. The music students trooped after him. Eleanor and Blanche were receiving their guests in front of the vast rust-coloured marble chimneypiece that dominated the room. Nathaniel on one side of them looked hot and rumpled, with his beard spreading over his white tie, while John Leominster on the other made an almost comical contrast in his stiffly immaculate evening clothes. Their wives looked as alike as the men were different. Although they both had fine threads of silver in their dark hair, and their figures were now unfashionably full, they still looked the Victorian belles that Sargent had painted. Blanche was in sea-green with the Stretton diamonds glittering on her bosom and in her hair. Eleanor wore dark blue shot silk, with the more modest jewels left to her by her mother the previous year. The dance for Clio and Grace was the first big family celebration to be held since Lady Holborough’s death. As Julius kissed them in turn he saw that Eleanor and Blanche both had the same eager, faintly anxious expression. It made them look even more the reflection of one another. He breathed in their old-fashioned flowery scents, white lilac and stephanotis. ‘Aunt Blanche, may I introduce my friends from the College?’ ‘Thank you, my darling,’ Eleanor whispered while the others shook hands with Nathaniel and John. ‘Such nice-looking boys. Won’t you take them now to meet Clio and Grace? I was so afraid that there would be no young men. But now I think it will be all right.’ Her anxious expression lightened a little. ‘Of course it will be all right.’ Julius smiled at her. He saw Clio, standing to one side of John Leominster. Her rolled-up hair showed her white neck, and the bodice of her dress revealed the childish knobs of bone at the base of her throat. Her head was bent, and she was reading the little tasselled booklet in which she wrote her partners’ names as if it interested her. ‘Clio, may I introduce my friend Victor Zuckerman?’ It was then that an avenue opened through the dancers and he saw Grace. She was waltzing with a man he didn’t know. Her head was back, and she was laughing. The wide skirts of her balldress made white waves over the polished floor. There were white flowers in her hair. Clio was thinking that it was a shame that so much hope and effort and anticipation should have been put into planning an evening that was so dull. She was aware of the apparent ingratitude of the thought; but then she decided that she was not being ungrateful, simply realistic. A good deal of money had been spent. Uncle John Leominster probably had the money to spare, although he counted every penny that his wife was spending on Grace’s Season. Clio knew that her own father didn’t even really have the money, and wouldn’t have been able to give her a season at all if Grandmother Hirsh had not helped him. And then, once he had consented to Clio’s coming out in the year before beginning to study for her degree, he had been generous to the limit of his means. It was Nathaniel who had insisted that Clio must have three balldresses, and new teagowns and suits and a visit to Blanche’s London coiffeuse, just like Grace. Nathaniel’s view was that if the job was to be done at all, it must be done properly. Clio felt a rush of love for her father. It was only a pity, she reflected, that his determination that she should be fairly treated and the collaboration between the two families should have resulted in the choice of the same band, the same food, the same flowers and apparently the same guests as at every other girl’s dance. The only difference, as she surveyed the room, seemed to be that here the faces were redder, the band more lacklustre, the air more stifling and the yawns behind the white gloves less well concealed than at any of the other dances she had been to. There had been a number of other dances. The first Season after the war was well under way, with a determination from everyone concerned that it should be as glittering as any Season had ever been. There had been tea-parties too, and ladies’ luncheons, and Clio had dutifully met and talked to the other girls of her year, and their mothers, and their surviving male relatives, and had invited the same girls under their mothers’ chaperonage to meet her own brothers and cousins this evening. There were far too many ancient Stretton and Earley and Holborough uncles, gallantly but creakily waltzing, and a severe shortage of the handsome young men that even Clio had allowed herself to dream of at her coming-out dance. In fact if it were not for some medical student friends of Jake’s, some boisterous Oxford men that Hugo had brought, and the odd-looking trio that had just appeared in Julius’s wake, there would be almost no young men at all. Clio missed Peter Dennis, as she had missed him every day for more than a year. She missed other things too: the calm routine of Oxford, her books and the garden, and the conversation of rational human beings. She thought she had never met so many empty-headed and snobbish people as she had done in the last month, nor wasted so much time in changing her clothes, eating food she did not want, and exchanging pointless small talk with girls she did not wish to talk seriously to. Clio was priggishly dismissing her season as a frivolous nonsense. She was only enduring it because it pleased her mother to see her, and because what pleased Eleanor also pleased Nathaniel. She would have been reluctant to admit to her dreams of meeting an interesting man. Clio was sure that she was still in love with Captain Dennis. Victor Zuckerman was asking her to dance. ‘Thank you,’ Clio said meekly, and let him take her hand. ‘Jolly good band,’ Victor tried, not quite managing a convincing imitation of Hugo or one of his friends. He smelt strongly of whisky. Clio looked at him, trying to gauge his expression behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. His hand felt burningly hot in the small of her back. But at least he danced in time to the music. He might not trample on the toes of her satin slippers. ‘Do you think so? It is the third time I’ve heard them this week. Familiarity must be breeding contempt.’ Over Mr Zuckerman’s shoulder she saw Grace’s partner leading her back to her place. Grace was still laughing, with her head close to his. Grace would always find something to enjoy, however dismal and predictable the occasion, Clio knew that. And yet she had been sent to finishing school in Switzerland as soon as the war ended. She had made new friends, travelled to Italy, had her horizons enviably broadened. Clio could not understand her pleasure in this boring ritual. ‘That’s a jolly pretty dress,’ Mr Zuckerman offered. ‘Thank you.’ Clio couldn’t help smiling at him, he was trying so hard. Her dress had been made by Eleanor’s Oxford dressmaker. It was paper-white taffeta, with a tendency to collapse into concave panels instead of standing out in a stiff bell. The same dressmaker had made her two other ballgowns, one shell-pink and one powder-blue with darker blue bows. Clio had wanted rippling gold satin and ink-blue velvet, but Eleanor had insisted that neither was suitable. Grace had been taken to Reville & Rossiter for her ballgowns. The London couture house was not quite Paris, of course, but it was good enough. Her dress tonight was oyster-white silk, tight-bodiced and pannier-skirted, with a hooped overskirt of the finest white net that made her look as if she was dancing in a halo of light. It was a romantic denial of all the sensible plain tunics of the war years. Clio looked away from where Grace was being led back into the dancing by a different partner. She tried to ignore the bitterness that she felt, telling herself that she should rise loftily above it. But it was difficult not to be aware of the gulf between the two of them, just because the whole evening seemed to emphasize it. The dance itself was being held in the Strettons’ house, whereas Clio and her family had travelled up from the increasingly battered and down-at-heel household in the Woodstock Road. Even the stiff engraved invitations declared the difference between Lady Grace Stretton and Miss Clio Hirsh. Clio was not ashamed of her Jewish name. She was fiercely proud of her father and his academic reputation. But she was sensitive enough to have noticed in the past weeks that other people spoke her name in a certain way, looked at her in another certain way, with a flicker of speculation. ‘The father is Jewish, of course,’ she had once overheard one matron whisper to another. Clio frowned, anger stiffening her spine a little. She looked across to where Dora Hirsh was sitting on a gilt chair. Levi Hirsh was dead, but Nathaniel’s mother was alert and straight-backed, a tiny figure in a shiny black dress with her black and gold net purse clasped on her lap. It was Dora’s money, mostly, that was paying for the band and the wilting flowers, and the bland chicken and dryish trifle that they would be eating later. Clio tried to convey love and pride and solidarity across the room to her grandmother. She was glad to see that Jake was sitting beside Dora on another gilt chair, volubly talking. ‘Are you all right?’ Victor Zuckerman asked. He must have felt Clio’s stiffness. ‘Didn’t tread on you, did I?’ It came to Clio that her partner was almost certainly Jewish too. She smiled at him with real warmth. ‘Of course not. You’re a good dancer.’ Victor beamed. He had just noticed that Hirsh’s rather prim and silent sister was extremely pretty when she smiled. Instinctively he held her closer, letting himself imagine her legs under the swathes of taffeta. The room grew hotter. Clio danced with Jake, and then with one of the medical students who told her he was her brother’s dissection partner. They shared a cadaver between them, he said proudly. Clio thought she could detect a faint smell of formalin clinging about him, reminding her of the Pitt-Rivers. The more elderly relatives were beginning to make their way to the supper-tables in the library when Blanche tapped Clio on the arm. ‘I don’t think you have met Mr Brock, Clio, have you? His mother was a cousin of your mother’s and mine on the Earley side.’ It was the man Grace had been laughing with. Clio saw that his evening clothes and his fairish hair were as conventionally cut as John Leominster’s, but his long, humorous face and a gap between his front teeth made him look immediately interesting, even rakish. ‘Anthony Brock,’ he said, taking her hand. Blanche had already moved away, having done her duty with yet another introduction. Clio had a momentary impression of a sea of polite pink faces, drifting away from her into oblivion, before she focused on Anthony’s. ‘I saw you dancing with my cousin Grace,’ she said, and, before she could stop herself, ‘What were you both laughing at so much?’ Anthony grinned. His well-dressed-brigand look intensified. ‘Ah, about the rituals and rigours of doing the Season. About all this, I suppose.’ One small movement of his forefinger took in the crowd, and everything that had seemed dismal about it to Clio at once became less depressing. ‘I was going to ask if I might have the honour of escorting you into supper?’ No one else had asked her. She answered with the same ironic formality. ‘With pleasure.’ The supper room was only half full, and it looked pretty with shaded candles on the little round tables. Clio’s spirits lifted further. Anthony Brock brought her a plate of the inevitable sauced chicken, and poured hock into her glass. Clio learnt that he worked in the City, in his father’s stockbroking company, but had ambitions to enter Parliament. He had fought in France, but it wasn’t until later that she heard from elsewhere that he had been awarded the MC. ‘And you?’ he asked. Clio blushed. ‘I’m going up to Oxford. Modern languages.’ ‘Are you, now?’ Anthony drank his wine reflectively. ‘You look very like your cousin,’ he told her. ‘I know.’ She was aware that he was studying her face. His head was a little on one side, as if he were making some decision. He put his glass down on the white cloth, matching up the foot to the faint circle left by its own weight. Then he said softly, ‘I told Grace that I was going to marry her. I don’t think she believed me.’ Clio felt her small, presumptuous glow of happiness dwindle and fade. Nothing changed, the half-eaten chicken on her plate retained the same consistency and the candles under their shades threw the same soft light, but the supper room was ordinary again, and the faces around them once more in focus, pink and solid. She lifted her head. She was glad that he was so direct. It was a relief not to have been left to cherish an illusion, a pointless illusion. ‘I don’t suppose she disbelieved the intention. It isn’t quite unique.’ Clio couldn’t keep all the sharpness out of her voice. It was true, in any case. Grace had accumulated several admirers and more than one proposal in the course of the Season. Clio herself had had her share, although she couldn’t imagine herself accepting any one of the offers. She thought they were oddly flippant. There was a desperation under the gaiety of it all that made her think that the men who had survived wanted nothing more than to turn their backs on what they had experienced, with any woman, the first to hand. She hadn’t talked about this to Grace, although she wondered if she felt the same. For all their present enforced intimacy, the two of them spoke only in superficialities. They were still wary, after their year’s separation. She went on, trying to sound kind. ‘It’s just that I don’t think Grace wants to marry anyone at all. Not yet.’ Anthony was perfectly composed. ‘I can wait,’ he said. ‘But I will marry her, in the end.’ Clio laughed then in spite of herself, liking him, and at the same time remembering how she had seen Grace laughing too. ‘I shall enjoy watching the chase. I wish you the best of luck.’ She meant the good wishes and Anthony saw that she did. He put out his hand again. ‘Shall we be friends?’ he asked her. ‘By all means,’ Clio said, shaking it. And so Anthony Brock became her friend as she became his ally in the pursuit of Grace. The evening was far from over. There were more introductions and more small talk, and yet more dances contracted for, entered on the card, and limply undertaken. Clio took her turn with the swarthy Mr Vaughan, the chronically nervous Mr Armstrong, her brothers, and Hugo’s friend Farmiloe. Hugo could not dance, but he was not short of company on his sofa to one side of the hideous chimney-piece. Hugo represented a catch, of course, and all the mothers were interested in him. Even Clio understood and accepted as much, even though it was plain that her own brothers were far cleverer and more handsome than the Viscount. At last, when it seemed that there was not another lungful of air left in the ballroom, the trickle of girls and chaperones making their thanks to Blanche and Eleanor became a steady stream. Eleanor was leaning on Nathaniel’s arm, with Blanche on his other side. John was in the card room, where most of the remaining men had retired to play bridge and smoke cigars. The sisters were weary but satisfied. They had achieved an evening neither more nor less remarkable than a hundred others. Their daughters had looked prettier than most of their competitors, they had danced every dance, and all the requirements of the occasion had been met. ‘Did you enjoy yourself, darling?’ Eleanor asked Clio when they found themselves looking at an empty floor littered with the bruised petals from corsages and tassels dropped from dance cards. ‘It was wonderful, thank you,’ Clio said dutifully. ‘I’ll always remember it.’ Grace had been patting a cloud of net into place around her white shoulders, but now she lifted her head and caught Clio’s eye. Her expression was one of such wicked mockery and humour and conspiracy that Clio had to look away quickly to suppress a snort of laughter. It came to her that Grace was her partner in all of this, her fellow and contemporary. Eleanor and Blanche, even Nathaniel, belonged to a remote generation. They are Victorians, Clio thought. She found herself wishing that she and Grace were better friends. Upstairs in the faintly chilly bedroom Clio took off the paper taffeta dress and hung it up. She stood in her petticoats in front of the looking glass to unpin her hair. The house was quiet at last. The bulbous mahogany bedroom suite gleamed faintly in the dim light of one electric bulb. The bed had been turned down ready for her, and there was tepid water in the ewer on the washstand, left for her by the maid. Clio splashed some of it into the white china bowl with the Leominster crest and carefully washed her face. She was pulling her nightdress over her head, shivering as she thought of the cold, stiff linen sheets waiting for her, when there was a knock at the door. A moment later Grace slid into the room. Her hair was in a plait over the shoulder, and she was wrapped in a flame-coloured silk robe with a golden dragon embroidered on the back. She was giggling, and Clio thought immediately that Grace had managed to put away more of the innocuous white wine than she had done herself. Sober or tipsy, Clio was surprised to see her. Late-night visits to one another’s bedrooms were not a feature of their present relationship. ‘Oh God,’ Grace was whispering, ‘Oh God, I thought it would never end. I told myself, if one more young man praises the band or asks me how I’m enjoying it all I shall scream until they send for the fire brigade.’ ‘You looked as if you were enjoying yourself well enough,’ Clio said reasonably. ‘You were laughing so much with Anthony Brock I thought you might be on the point of creating a frisson of interest.’ Grace sighed. ‘Oh, Anthony Brock.’ She flung herself down on Clio’s bed and patted the pocket of her robe. Then she extracted a flat cigarette case and a small gold lighter. She selected a cigarette and snapped her lighter. The flame lit one side of her face with a brief coppery glow, transforming her instantly into a woman of the world. ‘Grace.’ Clio was shocked. Grace held out the case. ‘Want one? No?’ She breathed out a long, efficient plume of smoke and leant back against Clio’s pillows. ‘It’s so bloody cold in here. Get in under the covers, for God’s sake.’ Clio did as she was told. They pulled the heavy blankets up around their shoulders. The cigarette smoke wreathed their heads. ‘Anthony Brock said he’s going to marry me. Didn’t ask me, told me.’ ‘I know.’ Grace’s eyebrows went up. ‘How?’ ‘He said so. At supper. We also agreed to be friends, and shook hands on it.’ ‘Cosy.’ ‘It was, rather. And so what did you say in response to this news?’ ‘Told him I wasn’t going to marry anyone.’ She sighed again, tilting her chin to stare up at the plaster fruit and flowers wreathing the cornice. ‘Oh, Clio. Darling Clio. Why is it always marriage? Is that all there is for us?’ ‘Not for me,’ Clio said, with a touch of smugness. Grace turned on one side then, so that she could see her cousin’s face. ‘You’re right. Not for you. How lucky you are, how very lucky. All there is for me is an extension of tonight. Politeness, and good form, and utter tedium.’ Clio was surprised by her vehemence. ‘You always look happy. I thought you were. Tonight, for instance.’ Grace shrugged. ‘I try to. One has to do that much.’ ‘You are very good at it. Much better than I’ll ever be. Listen, Grace. You don’t have to be conventional and do the right thing and marry whoever it is Blanche and John single out for you. Anthony Brock or anyone else.’ There was a voice within Clio whispering that Grace was lucky, as always, and that she would not reject Anthony as readily herself. But she ignored it and went on, ‘Five years ago you might have had to, but the war has changed all that. Women can live their own lives now. They have proved it, by doing men’s work. Look at all the women in shops and factories. I’m going to get my degree and then work as a translator. Live abroad.’ She began to be fired by her own fantasy. ‘Be what I want to be, not just a wife and mother. It was right for Eleanor and Blanche, Victorian ladies. But it’s not right for me. Not for us, Grace.’ Grace stabbed out her cigarette and sat upright, wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘Yes. You’re right, of course you are.’ She looked down at Clio with shining eyes. ‘Have you forgiven me?’ There was a moment’s silence. No, the voice whispered within Clio’s head. She said, ‘Yes.’ A year seemed a long time. Grace laughed, a little wildly. ‘Good. That’s very good. Let’s make a pact, Clio. Let’s promise each other that we won’t submit to the yoke. Let’s do what we do only because we want to do it, not because we think we ought to. We must be determined to enjoy ourselves. We must be free.’ Clio thought that Grace’s resolution was grandiose, but typically vague. She wasn’t quite sure what freedom from the yoke would mean in detail, and she didn’t think Grace did either. But she was beguiled by the passion of her declaration. ‘Modern women,’ she said, and Grace echoed her fiercely. ‘Modern women.’ If they had had wine they would have drunk a toast. Instead Grace proffered her cigarette case again. Clio took one now, and inexpertly lit it with the gold briquet. She inhaled, and coughed out a puff of swirling smoke. Jake and Julius walked out into Belgrave Square together. The June night air was sweet and cool and they lingered under the trees opposite the house. ‘Duty done,’ Julius said, with some satisfaction. ‘It was an adequate evening, I think, as such evenings go.’ It had even been more enjoyable than he had expected. Armstrong and the others had apparently met his mother’s requirements, and his friends in their turn seemed to have had plenty to eat and drink. They had gone off a little earlier in Zuckerman’s car. And for Julius himself, there had been the bonus of two dances with Grace. He put his hands in his pockets and looked up through the black fretwork of leaves over his head, into the sky where he could see a dusting of stars. He let himself remember the scent of her skin and hair, and the way that she reached up, putting her mouth close to his ear, so that he could hear what she said over the dance music. He found that he was smiling. Jake was moody and restless. He had undone his white tie and the ends hung unevenly over his shirt studs. He wanted some more to drink, something stronger than hock or his uncle’s third-best claret. He had not wished to penetrate the card room where whisky, brandy and port were on offer to John Leominster’s friends. ‘Adequate is a compliment,’ he grumbled. ‘Did you ever see such insipid girls? Were you introduced to the lisping Miss Beauchamp? Complexion like orange cr?pe-paper?’ ‘I can’t remember,’ Julius said cheerfully. His Grace-induced good humour was unshakeable. Jake put a heavy arm around his shoulder. ‘Well then, we’ve done our filial duty. Where shall we go to finish the evening off? Nightclub, d’you think?’ ‘Not me,’ Julius answered without hesitation. ‘I’ve got work to do tomorrow.’ ‘Come on.’ ‘No thanks. I’m going to walk quietly home up Park Lane.’ Julius’s rented rooms were behind Marble Arch. It was late enough, he was thinking, for his neighbour to have been in bed for hours. There was no chance that she would be lying in wait for him as he came up the stairs. Jake scowled at him. He was on the point of protesting when he saw the door of the house open and close behind Hugo and Farmiloe. Hugo walked stiffly now, on a wooden leg, with the aid of a stick. ‘All right, Julius. I shall have to fling myself on the mercy of Hugo and his brother officer. They will certainly have a plan of action.’ Julius knew that Jake was half drunk. ‘Don’t do anything reckless.’ Jake shouted, ‘If you would just do something reckless, for once. Something other than play the violin and moon after Grace.’ Julius glanced sharply across the road at Hugo. ‘That’s enough, Jake. Go on to your nightclub, if that’s what you enjoy. No doubt Hugo will be Culmington and keep an eye on you.’ He wrapped his white silk scarf around his neck and strolled away towards Park Lane. Jake swore under his breath, and then called after him, ‘Wait, Julius, can’t you?’ But a taxi was noisily drawing up on Hugo’s side of the street, and Julius seemed not to hear him. ‘Want a cab, gents?’ the driver asked. Hugo waved his arm. ‘Come on, Jake, come with us. We’re going somewhere lively.’ The inside of the cab smelt of gardenias and stale cigars. Farmiloe leant forward between Jake and Hugo. ‘Dalton’s, Leicester Square,’ he told the driver. The nightclub was entirely underground. Past the huge doorman who took Hugo’s money and waved them inside without another word, there was a narrow flight of steps leading down to a long, stale-smelling corridor. Farmiloe tried to take Hugo’s arm to help him, but Hugo impatiently shook him off and climbed down sideways, like a crab. Through the double doors at the distant end of the corridor they came to an enormous low-ceilinged room packed with people. A band was playing on a platform at the far side, and everyone was dancing. Jake stared at the jostling crowd and at the naked powdered back of the woman closest to him, and then he smiled. Here, it seemed, was everything that had been missing at his sister’s dance. The thick air itself seemed to taste of sin. They found a table against the wall, and Farmiloe beckoned to a waiter. ‘A bottle of brandy.’ There were bottles on every table, as far into the distance as they could see. ‘I’m very sorry, sir. It’s after ten o’clock.’ Ten o’clock was closing time, according to DORA. It was so much after ten that the three of them laughed uproariously. Farmiloe took out a five-pound note and smoothed it on the tabletop. A moment later the note was gone, and brandy and three glasses had materialized in its place. Jake drank, and felt benign anticipation replacing his earlier restlessness. Hugo and Farmiloe were good fellows, and good company. They knew what they liked, and where to find it. This was where he wanted to be, listening to Farmiloe’s stories through the throb of the music, and watching Hugo lean back to squint past his cigar smoke at the women on the dance floor. The bottle emptied itself and they called for another. The room was pounding with noise, making even their rudimentary conversation difficult to sustain. Jake had been watching a black-haired girl at the next table. Their eyes met, and a moment later she stood up, sinuous in a slip of satin dress, and came to lean over the back of his chair. Her mouth brushed his ear. ‘Won’t you ask me to dance?’ Jake rose to his feet. Hugo and Farmiloe didn’t appear to notice as he steered the girl away into the hot mass of dancers. It was too noisy to talk, too crowded to perform more than a shuffle. Jake saw that the girl’s eyes were closed and she was dreamily smiling. Tentatively he drew her closer, and then closer so that she bent against him, pliant and slippery under the thin satin. When he looked down at her face he saw that her powder was creased with sweat and caked at the corners of her eyes, and that she was no longer young, not a girl at all, nor even pretty. He didn’t care in the least. He felt that he loved her, and everyone else in the nightclub. Jake bent his head, and kissed her lipsticked mouth. He heard her give a small, sweet sigh. The woman looked up at him, a coquettish glance under her thin eyelashes. ‘Do you want to come home with me, dear?’ Jake had seen enough death. He had seen more men dead and dying than there were people packed into this room, but he had survived and he had brought home from the field hospital the discovery that he was not after all a coward, whatever the men who had fought more conventionally might think of him. He had seen the terrible things, and he had worked to alleviate some fraction of the suffering. Somehow he managed to contain the memory and the dreams of the war within himself, without letting anyone else know how they shadowed him. But it did seem that even now he could not escape from death. He had spent today hunched over a corpse, teasing out the strands of dead muscle tissue under their flaps of grey skin. He could smell decay as if it were embedded in his own nasal cavities, and now he wanted the scents of life. He wanted warm, living flesh under his hands and to taste the complicated flavours of skin and sweat. Jake left Hugo and his friend at their table. He didn’t care if they wondered why he had disappeared, or if they were too far gone even to remember he had been there. He followed the black-haired woman out into Leicester Square, and into the warren of streets around Shaftesbury Avenue. They came to an upstairs room with a brass bedstead and a jug and basin on the table behind a painted screen. There was a brief financial transaction. It didn’t worry Jake. He had enough money on him for her requirements, that was all that mattered. When she had folded it away the woman smiled at him. ‘How old are you, dear?’ He told her the truth. ‘Twenty-one. My name is Jake.’ She undid his waistcoat and took out his shirt studs. ‘Well then, Jake. Are you going to make me happy? A big, tall, beautiful boy like you?’ He said, ‘As happy as you will make me.’ He loved the deft, businesslike way she undressed him and herself, as if nakedness was normal and natural. He loved this room, with its bare walls and minimal furniture, the big bed. She settled back on it now, one arm behind her head, so that he could look at her. Her breasts rolled apart to expose the ridges of her breastbone. She had heavy thighs, dimpled and very white. They were scented and powdery, reminding Jake of some childhood sweet. Turkish Delight, he thought. He remembered how the sweets came tightly packed in frills of paper, jelly ridges pressed close together to yield under his fingers. He lowered himself on top of her. Her skin seemed to give off little puffs of her sugary scent mixed with a salty, alluvial smell much closer to the earth. She was very soft, soft everywhere, deliciously so. He wanted to bury himself in the rolls of melting flesh, deeper and deeper, until he silenced the endless commentary within his own head. She spread her legs for him, exposing liver-coloured lips lapped with fur. Jake’s breath whistled in his throat. Without any preliminaries he pushed himself up inside her, as far as he could reach, amazed by the slippery heat. He forgot that he was supposed to be making her happy, but that did not seem to matter particularly. He forgot everything except his own scalding pleasure. When he ejaculated a minute later he knew that what he had guessed was right, that none of his dreams or fantasies or masturbatory experiments could ever be as good as this reality. They gave only the faintest intimation of the heat and pressure and urgency of real love-making with a real woman. The sensation was so intense he thought that his heart might stop, or that he would faint, or that the blood vessels within his skull would burst. For a moment he would have been happy to die there on the brass bedstead. He didn’t die, or even faint. He lay with his face against the woman’s neck until his gasping breaths subsided. Then he opened his eyes. She seemed hardly to have moved; her head was still resting against her arm. There was a bluish patch of close-shaved stubble in the exposed armpit, where the salty smell was particularly strong. Living and breathing, Jake thought. Full of life. Her various emanations mixed with his own seemed to affirm the vitality he longed for. He nuzzled his face into the cup of blue-white flesh. The woman extracted her arm from beneath him and nudged him aside, not unkindly. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, sitting slumped for a moment with her back to him. ‘Can I see you again? Can I meet you?’ Jake asked, understanding that their present encounter was at an end. ‘If you like, dear. You know where to find me.’ She stood up and went behind the screen in the corner. He heard water splashing and the faint squeak of wet rubber. ‘I know,’ he said happily. He parted with her at the street door downstairs. She was back in her satin dress, in a hurry to be off. He wanted to kiss her goodbye, like a lover, but the gesture seemed inappropriate. He let her go, with regret, and walked back through the empty streets to his student digs in Bloomsbury. Quintus Prynne woke up late, with a headache that made him feel as if he had been clubbed. He opened his eyes and saw that he had fallen asleep on the divan of his studio, instead of in his bed at home. The litter of empty bottles and dirty glasses scattered between the paints and canvases and jars of brushes reminded him of some of the events of the night before. He tried closing his eyes again in order to dodge back into sleep, but it was too late. He was awake, with a mouth that felt full of sand and a vague sense of some obligation waiting to be fulfilled. Groaning softly in sympathy with himself he crawled out of bed and picked his black and white tweed suit out of a heap on the floor. After a careful search he found his pocket watch, and examined its accusing face. It was eleven-twenty in the morning, and he remembered what he was supposed to be doing. Calling on Lady Leominster in Belgrave Square, to discuss a portrait of her damned dough-faced daughters, that was it. He staggered across the room, groaning still. At the sink he splashed cold water over his head and face and then, in the absence of a towel, rubbed himself dry with yesterday’s shirt. The lack of a dry shirt, let alone a clean one, presented the next problem. The painter rummaged behind a curtain where he kept a small stock of old clothes in which to dress up his models. He found a grubby white cambric smock, and pulled his tweed trousers and coat on top of it. The addition of a piece of black silk foulard, extravagantly knotted around his neck, hid most of the smock front. He crammed his big black hat on his head and picked up a piece of stale bread and cheese left over from the night before for his breakfast. Quintus Prynne was humming as he sauntered down Charlotte Street, his headache almost forgotten. In the first-floor drawing room at Belgrave Square, Blanche was working at her embroidery and Eleanor had been reading the morning paper. She put it aside and looked over the top of her spectacles at the little gilt and porcelain clock on the mantelpiece. ‘This young man is very late, Blanche. I don’t believe he can be coming.’ ‘Perhaps artists are less fettered by notions of punctuality than ordinary people? I think we should wait. Mary Twickenham was saying that Pilgrim is the most admired painter of the young generation, and that we will be lucky to get him. His designs for the ballet were the most beautiful, Eleanor, I wish you had been with us. I’m not even sure why he agreed to come this morning. Perhaps John’s name impressed him?’ Eleanor smiled. ‘Perhaps. But I think your Pilgrim is much more likely to have been impressed by the size of the fee.’ Blanche answered with a touch of irritation, ‘If one wants the best, then of course one must pay for it. John agrees with me, we must have a portrait marking the girls’ year that is as fine as our Sargent. It should be a picture worthy to be hung next to ours at Stretton. Don’t you think so, Eleanor?’ ‘Of course, if that is what you both want. And if you say that Pilgrim is the finest portrait painter of his generation, then I can only accept that too.’ ‘He is very modern,’ Blanche added, as if that clinched the matter. ‘That will make the girls happy,’ Eleanor said, taking up the newspaper again. The painter was almost an hour late when the maid finally showed him into the drawing room. He had refused to part with his big black hat, and from the doorway he flourished it and swept a theatrical bow. ‘Ladies, I can but apologize. May I be forgiven?’ ‘Come and sit down, Mr Prynne. Or is it Mr Pilgrim?’ He bent over each of their hands in turn. Eyeing his clothes, Eleanor and Blanche felt that they were at least being repaid for their long wait with a full measure of artistic eccentricity. ‘For all my professional affairs, my name is Pilgrim. Just that, neither Mister nor anything else.’ ‘I very much admired your designs for the ballet, Mr, ah, Pilgrim.’ ‘La Nuit et la Rose? Thank you, Lady Leominster. Now, won’t you tell me exactly what sort of commission you have in mind?’ While Blanche told the story of The Misses Holborough and explained her wish to have another double portrait, this time of Clio and Grace, to hang alongside it, Pilgrim sat comfortably in his red silk-upholstered chair and looked around him. Eleanor saw that he examined the pictures on the walls, his expressionless stare shifting from the English watercolours to the dark oils of long-dead Stretton dogs, horses and ancestors. When Eleanor finished, Pilgrim sighed. ‘I see. You had not thought of discussing this second portrait with Mr Sargent himself?’ Pilgrim needed the fee that Lord Leominster had mentioned, but even the size of the fee failed to persuade him that it would be interesting to paint the d?butante daughters of these ladies. This room had already told him more than he wanted to know about their opinions and attitudes. There had been some discussion between Blanche and John about the possibility of Sargent painting the new portrait, and John had very quickly concluded that he would be too expensive. ‘Get the best of the young fellows, the next Sargent,’ he had advised Blanche, and Blanche had done her best. ‘We would prefer a more modern approach,’ Blanche told Pilgrim. A glint of amusement appeared in the painter’s reddened eyes. ‘You are interested in the modern movements? In Fauvism? The Cubists, perhaps?’ Blanche and Eleanor looked at each other. For a moment, it seemed that they might laugh. But then Blanche met Pilgrim’s eyes and answered valiantly, ‘Of course.’ Malice took hold of Pilgrim, a sensation he always enjoyed. ‘I commend your interest, Lady Leominster, Mrs Hirsh. I think, then, that I should meet the two young ladies?’ Blanche rang for the maid, and a moment later Grace and Clio came in together. They looked faintly sulky for having been kept waiting upstairs. Pilgrim stood up. He shook each hand in turn, and then walked slowly in a circle around the two girls. He rubbed his stubbled jaw, as if thinking. He had seen, of course, that the mothers were twins, but that had not interested him particularly. What was more intriguing was the physical similarity between these daughters, spiced with the differences in expression and manner. They looked far less dull than he had feared, less conventional than their mothers had led him to expect. One of them in particular, the Lady Grace, appealed to him strongly. There was a challenge in her eyes when she looked at him. Her face was plumper than her cousin’s, and her mouth made a more sensual curve. The other one, Miss Hirsh, was more defensive. She didn’t pout, but held her chin up, turning her face a little aside. Pilgrim held out one finger to her jaw and turned her to look full at him. He put his head on one side, as if appraising what he saw. He enjoyed the suppressed whisper of protest from the mothers. Pilgrim decided that the girls were pretty enough, and that it would be amusing to launch a leisurely, elaborate tease on the parents. He was also, he reminded himself, in serious need of their money. They would get their portrait, but it would be the picture that he chose to paint. ‘Very well,’ he snapped. ‘I accept the commission. For the first sitting, my studio at number twenty-two Charlotte Street, next Wednesday at three o’clock sharp, if you please.’ Afterwards, Clio said to Grace, ‘Well. What did you make of that?’ Grace yawned, pretending lazy indifference. ‘Of those clothes, and that hat? And was it my imagination, or did he smell, rather?’ ‘He smelt.’ ‘But he did have quite wonderful eyes,’ Grace added. They were coal-black, under thick black brows that met over the bridge of his nose. ‘He did, didn’t he? Do you suppose anyone has ever before appeared in Aunt Blanche’s drawing room looking so unshaven, so disreputable?’ ‘Never. Wasn’t it delicious? They took it like lambs. He must be very clever or sought-after, or something.’ ‘What do you think it will be like having our portrait painted?’ ‘Less boring than I had feared,’ Grace answered. The first sitting took place as Pilgrim had commanded. Grace and Clio presented themselves at his studio in their white dresses, with Blanche as chaperone. Pilgrim found her a hard chair in a corner, and then turned his back on her. Blanche noted that the high room under its glass skylight was clean, if bare, and that Pilgrim himself was clean-shaven and tidily dressed in a blue painter’s smock over flannel trousers. He spent a long time positioning the girls, prowling around them and lifting an arm or turning a shoulder. At length, he had them sitting side by side, but so close together that Clio’s shoulder was in front of Grace’s. They looked as if they were leaning together for support, but their heads were turned in opposite directions, away from each other. Pilgrim was satisfied. He retreated behind his easel and began to work, making quick flicks with his wrist. The only sounds in the studio were his cuff brushing over the canvas, and the dim popping of the gas fire. Blanche was only too aware that she had been sitting still for an hour and a half without so much as a cup of tea. The painter took regular draughts from a cup at his elbow, but he didn’t offer anything to the sitters or their chaperone. At last, he stood back from his work. ‘That is enough for today,’ he announced. Blanche stood up with relief and strolled over to look at what he had done. She was surprised to see that there was a sheet of coarse paper pinned over the canvas, and the only marks on it were a series of rectangles, thick charcoal lines, boxes within boxes, receding within themselves like a Chinese puzzle. Pilgrim removed the paper. ‘I prefer not to have my work in progress inspected in ignorance,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry,’ Blanche said humbly. Grace and Clio looked at each other with awed expressions. At dinner that evening, Blanche told John that she had found the portrait sitting very boring and uncomfortable, and that she did not intend to stay for the next. ‘There are two of them, after all,’ she reasoned. ‘I would not leave one of them alone with him, but they can look after each other. I’m sure Eleanor would agree, if she were here.’ Eleanor had gone back to Nathaniel and her younger children in Oxford. ‘Don’t you think so, John?’ ‘If you say so, my dear,’ John Leominster answered, without much interest. For their next sitting, Blanche’s chauffeur drove the girls to Charlotte Street, and was instructed to call back for them in two hours’ time. Pilgrim met them at the door. ‘No Mama today?’ he enquired. ‘I’m afraid that Mama found your studio draughty and dull,’ Grace answered. ‘Is that so?’ Pilgrim was all innocent surprise. This time they found that the room under the skylights was much warmer, almost cosy, that tea had been assembled on a little table near the fire, and that the bench on which he had originally posed them had metamorphosed into a divan covered with shawls. ‘Shall we have some tea first?’ the painter invited. ‘Tea and conversation?’ He handed cups and plates as decorously as if he were in a Belgravia drawing room. Clio and Grace drew their chairs up, lulled by the normality. ‘I can’t paint you in those terrible clothes,’ Pilgrim announced after a few minutes. ‘Why not?’ Grace was indignant. She was pleased with her Reville & Rossiter silk. ‘They make you look like virgin sacrifices.’ ‘Isn’t that the idea of d?butante dresses?’ Clio retaliated. Pilgrim was delighted. ‘Oh yes, of course. But I still can’t paint you in them. What have you got on underneath?’ The teacups and iced cake were suddenly incongruous. Grace rose to the challenge, determined not to reveal that she was not constantly answering such questions. She recited, ‘Underskirt, with panniers stitched into it to give extra fullness to the skirt. Two petticoats beneath that, one stiffened, one not. Silk stockings. Silk chemise and knickers.’ Clio said, when Pilgrim looked at her in turn. ‘The same, in less luxurious versions.’ ‘Good. We’ll try the chemises, then. You can go behind the screen, if you wish.’ They didn’t dare look at one another. A moment ago they had been sipping tea. Evidently Pilgrim thought nothing of leaping straight from conventional to alarming behaviour. They felt embarrassed by their own inexperience, and unwilling to reveal that they were shocked. Pilgrim read every scruple in their faces. He was lazily excited by their similarity, and by the small shades of difference. He saw their rivalry, too, and counted it out for himself like currency. He would use it later, to make his purchases. ‘I am a painter,’ he told them patiently. ‘I am used to working with female models, clothed and unclothed. I am also a designer of theatre sets and costumes and I have dressed ballerinas and actresses. I have seen women’s legs before this afternoon.’ They went behind the screen and emerged again with their heads up, daring him and each other. Pilgrim’s interest quickened. He studied them, sitting side by side on the divan. ‘Good skin,’ he said at last. ‘I like the light and the dark.’ He touched Clio’s white shoulder and stroked Grace’s hair. They shivered, although it was warm in the studio. ‘The hair is too formal.’ As deftly as a ladies’ maid, he took out the pins and combs. Hair fell down in thick, dark waves over the pale skin. ‘Good. Much better.’ He twisted Clio’s hair loosely again to reveal her neck and jaw and secured it with a single comb. He left Grace’s luxuriantly loose, blurring the family likeness. A pleasing series of opposites and contrasts was beginning to present itself. He found that he was surprisingly eager to begin work on the portrait. ‘Lean against each other,’ he commanded. Their shoulders touched. He put his finger to each cheek and turned their heads away. He liked the dynamic contradiction of the pose. With a casual gesture, almost an afterthought, he pulled the strap of Grace’s camisole off her shoulder to reveal the top of one of her breasts. At once the memory of her mother’s innocent portrait came back to her, and her nervous apprehension forced its way out of her as a choked giggle. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/rosie-thomas/all-my-sins-remembered/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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