Читать книгу All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 6

‘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 débutante, 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 fiancée 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.’