Читать книгу All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 10

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 débutante.

‘When I make my concert début,’ 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 crêpe-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 débutante 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 débutante 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.