Читать книгу All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 7

Clio lay on her back on her bed, her knees drawn up, following with her eyes the pattern of cracks in the ceiling. She was listening to the familiar sounds of the house, disentangling the various layers as they drifted up to her attic bedroom.

Closest to hand was the sound of Julius practising. He ran up a scale and down again, up and down, the chains of notes left hanging in the air to be overtaken by their successors. Clio knew that he would be standing with his eyes shut, his face closed with concentration and his black hair falling over his forehead as the bow dipped and rose. As she listened the scale stopped and Julius launched into a piece of Bach. Clio nodded and folded her hands behind her head.

From below her, in the nursery, she could hear Alice begin to cry, and then the creaking footsteps of Nanny Cooper crossing the room to pick her up, or retrieve her ball, or whatever it was that she needed.

The baby Alice was only two years old, the last-born of the Hirsh children. The next-youngest, Tabitha, had been born in 1910, when the twins were already nine and Nathaniel had long given up hope of his chamber orchestra. After the twins Eleanor had suffered two miscarriages, and had been sure that there was no hope of another child. But then Tabitha had come, a big, contented baby who lay in her crib and smiled at the world, and two years later Alice arrived. Alice never seemed to sleep or to rest and she had a shrill, frequent cry, but she was also endlessly inquisitive and resourceful in comparison with her placid sister. Nathaniel loved all his children, but he knew that Alice was almost certainly the last baby and she was his adored favourite. It was Alice he looked for first, after Eleanor, when he came into the house, and he had infinite patience with her. In return Alice would do anything Nathaniel wanted her to, even go to sleep, whilst refusing the overtures of everyone else in the family.

There were two younger children in the Stretton family too, Thomas and Phoebe, born four and seven years after the arrival of Grace. But all the younger children, cousins and siblings from Thomas right down to Alice, were always impatiently dismissed by the older ones as the Babies. For Jake and Julius and Clio and Grace only reckoned with themselves, or with Hugo as an occasional extra.

Downstairs, Alice’s screaming stopped abruptly. Nanny must have done something to pacify her. Clio strained to discern the other more distant noises. A door opened somewhere, and Clio thought she could just catch the click click of her mother’s heels across the coloured tiles of the hall. She would be walking quickly from her drawing room to Nathaniel’s study, perhaps with an armful of flowers from the garden, or the post to put on the corner of her husband’s desk. Clio smiled. At the heart of the house there was an absence of noise, the silence of Nathaniel working. He would be sitting at his desk or in the decaying armchair beside it, his beard sunk on his chest and his reading spectacles pinching the bridge of his nose. When he took the spectacles off he would massage the reddened place where they had rested.

The other noises were the ordinary sounds of the house in the Woodstock Road. The wood panelling and the floorboards creaked and protested under so many feet. The metallic rattle might be one of the two housemaids carrying an enamel jug of hot water to the nursery. The muffled thumping could be Jake descending the stairs, or Tabby banging her wooden blocks, or Mr Curler the handyman performing some repair job in the back scullery. And all these domestic sounds were wrapped in the outside whisper of the breeze in the garden trees. They made Clio feel comfortable; she had been hearing them all her life.

Now she turned her head, trying to distinguish the other sound that she was waiting for. The rattle of a car drawing up in the Woodstock Road would be an intrusion, the beginning of much more serious intrusions. Everyone else in the house was waiting for the car too, but the difference was that everyone else was looking forward to its arrival. Clio sighed. The car would bring Aunt Blanche for two days, and Hugo and Grace for much longer: their summer visit to Oxford.

Julius must have been listening too. He stopped playing in the middle of a bar, and it was two beats longer before Clio heard the throaty mumble of the idling engine at the kerbside.

A door opened inside the house and Jake’s voice rose up the stairwell. ‘They’re here!’

Clio swung her legs over the side of her bed and stood up, smoothing the layers of her skirts. She looked at herself in the small mirror hung over her plain wooden dressing table; a long look, without a smile.

Grace stood on the tiled path that led up to the front porch. She tilted her head back to gaze upwards at the Gothic windows and the pointed eaves and the absurd round turret under its witches’ hat of purple slate. Grace was smiling. She was glad to be here, she was always glad to be with her cousins. Jake ran down the steps from the front door and she held out her hands to him. He took them in his and leant closer, to kiss her cheek, as he always did. Grace slid away from him, leaving his lips pursed against the air, and she looked at him with amusement from under her eyelashes.

‘Hello Jake,’ she said, acknowledging him and demanding his acknowledgement too that she was older, prettier, more adult than she had been the last time they met, at Christmas. She had been silently practising the exact note all the way in the car. She was pleased to see that he did look again at her, with a different expression, still holding her hands.

Julius came out, with Eleanor and Nathaniel behind him. Julius was as tall as Jake but thinner, and he moved more tentatively, without his brother’s good-humoured confidence. Julius kissed Grace as he had always done. Grace did not try to demonstrate any changes to Julius, nor did she know that there was no need to because he saw them at once. Julius saw everything about Grace and remembered, storing up the precious hoard of memories.

Hugo had held back to help his mother down from the car. Hugo was nearly seventeen, almost grown up. He was fair like his father, even his colouring setting him apart from the others. Hugo shook hands heartily and automatically; Julius had once said that it made him feel like one of the Stretton tenants.

The sisters had kissed and Nathaniel had embraced Blanche before Clio appeared in the doorway. She came slowly down the stairs, listening to the confusion of greetings, and stood at the top of the front steps looking down. She saw that Grace’s navy-blue tucked linen dress was crisp, and that her own was creased from rolling on the bed. She also saw that Grace had done her hair differently, drawing it back over her ears to show more of her face.

‘Clio, oh Clio, I’m so happy to see you.’

Grace ran up the stone steps and flung her arms around her cousin. She hugged her, almost swinging her off her feet in her exuberance. At once Clio felt pleased and flattered and ashamed of her own reluctance. It was impossible not to love Grace for her warmth and enthusiasm and all the life in her. Clio hugged her back, murmuring that she was happy too. She was only thinking that Jake and Julius loved Grace, of course they would do, but that in return she behaved as if they were hers, by some seigneurial right.

They are not hers, Clio reiterated. She was fiercely proud of her brothers, and the pride was coupled with possessiveness.

‘You can have no idea how boring it has been at Stretton all these months,’ Grace was saying. ‘How much I have longed for company, died to be with you all. I would look out of the windows at the trees and grass and emptiness and moan with misery.’

‘What nonsense you talk, Grace,’ Hugo said briskly.

‘How would you know about misery, or ecstasy, Hugo, for that matter? When you are only concerned with cricket?’

Grace linked her arms through Jake’s and Julius’s and drew them up into the house with her. Clio followed thoughtfully behind, leaving Hugo to accompany the parents into the drawing room.

The four of them climbed to the playroom, their old headquarters near the top of the house. Over the years they had played and plotted across the worn carpets and horsehair sofas, and the scuffed tables and bulging cupboards showed the scars of imaginary battles and voyages. The room was so familiar to them all that none of them even glanced around. Jake dropped at full length on to one of the sofas, letting one long leg swing over the arm. Clio and Julius sat on the club fender, one on either side of the empty grate. They were alike, with the same narrow faces and the same peak of hair springing from their foreheads, but the family resemblance was just as strong between Clio and Grace.

Grace stood in the middle of the room, with their eyes on her. ‘Now, tell me the news,’ she insisted. ‘All the news.’

‘Jake is going to be house captain next term,’ Clio said proudly.

Jake and Julius were boarders at a school near Reading. Clio attended a girls’ day school in Oxford. Only Grace was being educated at home, by a governess, just as her mother and aunt had been at Holborough. She was quick-witted and had an excellent memory, but she guessed that she was not academically clever like her Hirsh cousins. She also knew that by comparison with them she was under-educated; Nathaniel was a great believer in the power of learning, whereas John Leominster considered it quite good enough just to be born a Stretton, especially for a mere girl.

The Woodstock Road house had always been full of books and atlases and globes of the night sky, taken for granted by the Hirsh children. Grace had concealed her ignorance by always trying to take the lead, directing the talk or the game on to ground that was safe for her. She preferred Kim’s Game to quizzes, fantasy to fact. She looked down at Jake now.

‘Isn’t that rather Culmington?’ she demanded.

Grace had coined the term from Hugo’s title. In the beginning they had used it to describe the qualities stoutly advocated by Hugo himself: decency and fairness and a willingness to play the game by the rules. There was no malice against Hugo in it, it was simply that the circle considered themselves more imaginative and less conventional than the Viscount. By extension the term had come to refer to doing the right thing, public spirit, duty and virtue. To dullness.

Jake waved languidly. ‘One has to accept these tasks.’ He said to Clio, ‘Grace didn’t mean that kind of news.’ He knew that Grace was asking him to offer his equivalent of what now seemed so obvious and intriguing about her, evidence that he had grown up.

‘What kind, then?’ Clio demanded.

Grace began to walk to the window, measuring her steps. ‘News of life. Love.’

‘Love?’ Julius sniggered; reached across the gap of the fender to nudge Clio. Julius was still a boy, only thirteen.

Grace’s eyes met Jake’s, and they smiled. Watching, Clio knew that her cousin had created a pair with Jake, and that she and Julius were excluded.

At the window Grace spread her hands on the sill and looked down into the road. There was a grocer’s delivery cart clopping by, her mother’s car with the chauffeur polishing its gleaming nose, almost no one else to be seen. Oxford was asleep in the depths of the Long Vacation. But after Stretton the Woodstock Road looked as busy as Piccadilly.

‘What shall we do?’ she asked.

‘You choose. It’s your first afternoon,’ Julius said politely, wanting to cover up his lapse.

‘Pitt-Rivers, then,’ Grace answered.

They left the playroom and chased down the stairs, as if they were children after all.

Blanche and Eleanor were drinking tea together. Hugo had gone out, announcing that he wanted to look around the place. The next year at Eton would be his last and he planned to go up to Christ Church. His attitude to Oxford was already calmly proprietary. The other children laughed at this embodiment of Culmington.

They met Nathaniel at the bottom of the stairs. He had shrugged himself into his light summer coat, and carried his panama hat in one hand and a leather bag full of papers in the other.

‘We’re going to Pitt-Rivers, Grace has chosen. Where are you going, Pappy?’

‘Into College, just for an hour. If you would like, I will meet you at Pitt-Rivers and we can walk in the Parks.’

‘Yes, yes we can do that. Only don’t forget about us as soon as you get to College and sit there for hours and hours, will you?’

‘I’ll try not to,’ Nathaniel said, not denying the possibility.

They left the house and walked towards the city, through the patches of shade cast by the big trees lining the road and out into the sunshine again. Nathaniel walked quickly, taking long strides, but the children easily kept pace with him. When they came to the red-and-yellow bulk of Keble, with its chapel looking – as Clio always said – like some animal on its back with its legs in the air, they turned into Parks Road and Nathaniel left them.

The Pitt-Rivers loomed across the road. They hurried over to the arched entrance and the yawning attendant in his booth nodded them in. They passed through the door and into the museum.

The smell descended around them. It was compounded of dust, formaldehyde, and the exudations of rumbling hot-water pipes, animal skins and bones, and mice. The air was thick from being long enclosed, and the dim light hardly illuminated the exhibits in their glass cases. The silence was sepulchral.

The cousins breathed in; looked up into the wooden galleries rising above their heads where the occasional shuffling don might be glimpsed, and fanned out ready to make their tour of inspection.

They had been visiting the museum ever since they were old enough for Nathaniel to bring them, on wet winter afternoons when their woollen hats and mufflers steamed gently and added to the miasma. It had been an outing, a place where Nathaniel told stories sparked off by the sight of a gruesome shrunken head or a decorated shield, a mysterious treasure cave remote from the humdrum Oxford, and for Grace a source of information that she secretly gathered to herself. Grace knew about the earth’s mineral deposits because she had learnt the display labels beside the glittering chunks of quartz and mica and haematite.

Later, when they were a little older, Pitt-Rivers had become a place of refuge away from the house. No one ever objected to their making the short walk to the museum. They had drifted between the tall cabinets, peering in at the jumble of trophies within and then at their own reflections in the murky glass, waiting for something to happen.

Each of them had their favourite exhibits and they visited them in ritual order, jealously checking to make sure that each item of the display was intact. Jake liked the Mammals, a small collection of stuffed arctic foxes and ermines and skunks with mothy hides and bright glass eyes, their stiff legs and yellow claws resting on wooden plaques garnished with little fragments of tundra. Julius preferred the Story of Man, a Darwinian series of tableaux culminating in Modern Man, a wax dummy complete with bowler hat and starched collar. Clio headed for the Dinosaurs, peering upwards through the ark of a rebuilt rib-cage and sighing over the great empty skulls.

Grace’s favourite was Geology, considered very dry by the others. She could stand for hours looking at the black slabs stained with ochre iron, at polished golden whorls and salty crystals, and at an egg of grey rock split to reveal the lavender sparkle of raw amethyst.

She found that her rocks were all in their places, the labels beside them only a little yellower and the spidery handwriting fading into paler sepia. She rested her forehead against the glass, transfixed by the mathematical purity of hexagonal prisms of quartz. She was thinking that her mother’s diamonds came from the same source, from rocks like these chipped out of the deep ground somewhere. Grace liked the diamonds although they would be worn by Hugo’s wife, not her, but she preferred these other crystals still half embedded in their native rock. They gave her a vertiginous sense of the earth’s prodigality, her own smallness in comparison.

She was still leaning her head against the case when Jake came up behind her. He stood at her shoulder, looking down at the eternal display of stones. Then he shifted his gaze to Grace’s hair, a thick ringlet of it lying over her shoulder, and the lines of her cheek and jaw. He saw that her breath made a faint mist on the glass. He reached up with his finger and touched the haze, and it seemed such an intimate part of Grace herself that the blood suddenly hammered in his ears and he opened his mouth to suck in the thinned air.

With the tip of his finger in the mist Jake traced the letter G.

Grace turned to look at him then with colour in her face that he had never seen before. Jake felt as if a fist had struck him in the chest, but he looked steadily back at her. He saw the faint bronze flecks in the brown of her eyes.

Something had happened, at last.

Then they heard Clio calling them in the sibilant whisper that stood for a proper shout in the vaults of Pitt-Rivers. ‘Grace, Jake? Where are you? We’ve been here for an hour. Pappy will be waiting.’

‘We had better go,’ Grace said.

Jake stumbled after her, blinking, out into the July sunshine.

Nathaniel was sitting on a low wall reading a newspaper. His panama hat was tipped forward to shield his eyes from the sun and his leather bag stood unregarded at his feet.

They called to him, ‘Pappy, Uncle Nathaniel, we’re sorry to keep you waiting, don’t be vexed …’

Nathaniel did not look up. He was reading intently, his thick eyebrows drawn together and the corners of his mouth turned down in the springy mass of his beard.

‘Pappy …’

He did look up then. He was still frowning but he folded the newspaper carefully into its creases, smaller and smaller still, and poked it away out of sight between the books and papers in his bag.

‘Here you all are,’ he said, tipping his hat back as if he was glad of the distraction they provided. His frown disappeared a moment later and he stood up, swinging the bag over his shoulder by its leather strap and holding out his other arm to Grace. ‘Is everyone ready? Then off we go.’

They turned through the big iron gates into the University Parks. There was a vista of heavy-headed trees and smooth grass, and flowerbeds subsiding into high-summer exhaustion. The scent of mown lawns was welcome after the thick atmosphere of the museum.

‘We should have called in for Tabby and Alice,’ Nathaniel said. He enjoyed having all his children around him. ‘They love the Parks.’

‘No, not the Babies,’ the older ones groaned.

Grace walked with her arm in Nathaniel’s, chattering to him. Clio and Julius and Jake walked close behind, following their shadows over the grass. Jake felt as if his eyes and ears had been suddenly opened. The colours were almost painfully vivid, and he could hear bees humming, even the splash of the river over the rollers beyond Parsons’ Pleasure. He struggled to listen to what the twins were saying, and to frame ordinary responses.

They came to the river rippling under a high arched footbridge. Clio and Julius ran up the steep slope of the bridge and hung over the metal railing to peer into the depths. When they were small they had dropped stones, and twigs to race in the winter currents. Today the river was sluggish, deep green in the shade of the willows. Jake caught the whiff of mud and weed.

Nathaniel said, ‘If you would like to walk up to the boathouse, we could take out a punt.’

Clio and Jake were enthusiastic. Punting was always popular with the Hirshes, and on a hot afternoon it was pleasant to lie back on cushions and glide over the water. Only Grace said nothing, and Julius was quiet too, observing her. Nathaniel led the way along the river path under the branches of the willows, to the point where the punts were tied up. The boatman scrambled across the raft of them, setting the boats rocking and the water slapping against the flat bottoms. Feather pillows were handed into one of the boats, and Nathaniel selected a hooked pole, weighing it critically in one hand.

Grace stood on the sloping jetty, watching Clio sit down and spread her skirts. She wanted to step in too, but she couldn’t move. The sight of the rocking boat and the sound of slapping water froze her, as they had done ever since the Mabel. Grace hated to be afraid, but she couldn’t conquer this fear. She recoiled from the innocent river as if it might flow up the jetty and engulf her.

Julius and Jake hesitated beside her. Julius knew what held her back, because his senses were highly developed where Grace was concerned. Jake was looking at her curiously.

‘I think, Uncle Nathaniel, I would rather walk on the bank today. If you don’t mind, of course?’ Grace’s voice was clear and steady.

Nathaniel saw what was the matter, and blamed himself for his insensitivity. ‘Walk by all means, Grace. We will keep pace with you.’

‘Don’t hold back on purpose. Perhaps Jake will walk too, to keep me company?’

‘Good idea. Thank you, Jake,’ Nathaniel said. Julius scrambled into the punt after Clio, without looking round. The twins sat facing each other amongst the piled cushions and Nathaniel stationed himself at the back. He dropped the pole into the water, pushed, and twisted it to lift it free. The punt shot forward and drops of spray scattered concentric circles in its wake.

Grace and Jake began to walk, side by side.

Jake could think of nothing to say, now he had the unthinkable chance of being alone with her, out of earshot of noisy siblings and all the busy demands of the Woodstock Road. He wanted to say everything, to pour out his astonishment that Grace, who was only his cousin and ally, had suddenly turned into an intriguing mystery. He wanted to ask her if she felt the same, to compare and confide, to draw her closer, this unknown Grace. The clumsy words jammed in his head. He could only manage, thickly, ‘It’s all different, all of a sudden. It is, isn’t it?’

Grace seemed calm, as if she understood everything. She nodded her head once, very slowly, ‘Yes. Everything is different.’

‘You’re not just Grace any longer.’

‘Nor are you just Jake.’ Her voice was very low, almost inaudible.

Jake could hardly breathe. So Grace felt it too, then, this naked and painful awareness? The intimacy of it was terrifying, and intoxicating. They were walking very close together. Their arms almost brushed, and then Jake’s fingers hanging loosely at his side touched the tips of Grace’s. A current shot up his arm. Their hands groped, in the folds of Grace’s blue skirt, and then clasped together. They walked on, linked together, staring straight ahead of them at Nathaniel’s back as he bent and straightened to the pole.

Clio sat facing them, her expression unreadable at this distance. It was like holding Clio’s hand, Jake thought. This hand was the same shape as Clio’s, there was the same warmth in the palm of it. But there was the sudden, startling difference. Bewildered, Jake tried to work out what he did feel.

He wanted to take Grace and hold her against the ribbed trunk of one of the trees; he wanted to rub his face against her and push his hands into the blue dress. He felt like an animal, like one of the museum’s Mammals in rut, in the grip of terrible instincts. He was disgusted, and ashamed, and confused by what had been set off within him.

He believed that what he was thinking about Grace was almost as bad as thinking it about Clio.

Jake’s skin burned and his vision blurred, but he went on walking stiffly, staring ahead of him, all the heat of him concentrated in the palm of his hand.

Grace was silent too. She was thinking, If he tries to kiss me, what will I do? She wanted him to kiss her, she wanted him to admit, although she couldn’t even have defined what the admission would be. She knew that she had suddenly acquired some power, but now she had sensed it she was afraid of using it.

She thought, I’ll let him, and then I’ll break away from him and run. I’ll know he loves me, he’ll be mine then …

Jake didn’t try to kiss her. He walked on, miserably, his eyes fixed on Clio and Nathaniel and Julius on the river, but he held on to Grace’s hand as if he would never let go.

At last they saw Nathaniel draw the pole in a wide arc from the stern of the punt. The long nose swung across the river until it pointed back towards them. It was time to head home again. Jake and Grace jumped guiltily apart. They stood awkwardly until the punt drew level and Clio’s accusing eyes settled on them.

‘Are you enjoying the walk?’ Nathaniel boomed.

‘Yes, thank you,’ Grace said.

They turned together and began to follow the punt once more. Instead of all the things he wanted to say and couldn’t, and all the banalities he might have settled for instead, Jake blurted out, ‘Are you afraid of boats?’

It was the first time since the Mabel summer that Grace had been obliged directly to refuse to go out on to the water. Usually, with some ingenuity, she was able to evade the possibility well in advance. Now she thought how inadequate Jake’s words were. ‘Afraid of boats’ took no account of the nights when she bit the insides of her mouth to stop herself falling asleep, so the dreams couldn’t come, nor of the waking cold terror of the sound of the waves, of the simple smell of salt water.

She said, ‘I think you might be too, if you had almost drowned.’

‘Why didn’t any of us know? Haven’t you told anyone?’

Grace considered. ‘I think Julius guessed.’

Jake didn’t want to hear about Julius now. Grace went on, ‘I haven’t told anyone. Only you.’

Jake gave her such a look of happiness and gratitude for singling him out that Grace forgot her humiliation over the punt.

‘You mustn’t worry about it, Grace, I’ll look after you, there’s no need to be afraid of anything.’

She smiled, looking up at him, tasting some of the satisfaction of power. ‘Thank you, Jake,’ she whispered. He was her admired cousin, their long-time ringleader, and she wanted his allegiance to her alone, that was the admission. And it came to her that although Jake was sixteen and clever and she was three whole years younger and had been taught nothing, she still knew more than he did.

Behind the folds of her skirt she reached her hand to touch his again, and he took hold of it as though it were the Grail itself.

The twins and Nathaniel were waiting at the jetty. Julius looked from one of them to the other, with resignation. Clio stared straight ahead, and even in his confusion, Jake saw that she was jealous. He took care to walk beside her on the way home. Only Nathaniel seemed oblivious to what had been happening. He had taken the newspaper out of his bag again and he beat the rolled-up tube of it against his leg as he strode along.

When they came home, Eleanor was waiting for Nathaniel. ‘Oswald Harris is here,’ she said. ‘In your study.’

Dr Harris was one of Nathaniel’s colleagues, a specialist in Romance languages and an old family friend. He was a particular favourite of the Hirsh children, and Clio’s face brightened at the mention of his name.

‘Oh good. Will he play something with us?’

‘Not now, Clio,’ Nathaniel said abruptly. ‘Off you go, all of you.’ He went into the study, and they saw Dr Harris jump up to greet him without his usual smile. Eleanor and Blanche were left in the hallway, their clothes dappled with coloured light from the stained-glass panels in the front door.

Afterwards the cousins recalled that evening at the end of July as the first time they heard adult talk of Serbia and Austria, and the first time they overheard the murmured word crisis.

They paid little attention to it, then.

That year Hugo and Jake were considered old enough to join their parents for dinner, but the twins and Grace still had to sit down with the Babies for nursery supper. Jake was hanging up his jacket in the boot room and Nanny Cooper was already calling the rest of the children to the table when Grace appeared in the doorway. The boot room was a place of discarded galoshes and fraying straw hats and croquet mallets, and she looked around it with a brilliant smile.

‘You’re here,’ she whispered. Her eyes were shining. She closed the door silently, and came straight to him. She put her hands on his forearms, and then she reached up and kissed him on the mouth.

It was a long kiss, soft-lipped and tasting of strawberries.

Jake almost fainted. When she drew back he croaked, ‘Grace, come here again, please …’ but she was already at the doorway, easing open the door and checking the corridor beyond.

Her lips looked very red, and her smile dazzled him. ‘If I don’t go, Nanny will be down here to find me. But this is a good place, isn’t it? We can meet here again. There’s all the summer, Jake.’

Then she disappeared.

Dinner was interminable. All Jake wanted was to escape to his bed, to think in privacy and silence, but the adults and Hugo seemed disposed to sit with grave faces and talk all night.

‘It must come,’ Dr Harris judged. ‘I cannot see how it can be avoided now that Germany and France have mobilized.’

‘There must not be a war. Think of our poor boys,’ Blanche whispered.

‘If it does come, and I agree with Dr Harris that it must,’ Hugo intoned, ‘then I shall enlist at once. It will be over by Christmas, and I don’t want to miss it.’

‘Hugo, you can’t possibly. You are only sixteen years old.’

‘Almost seventeen, Mama, quite old enough. What do you say, Jake?’

Jake was startled out of his own thoughts, and unreasonably irritated that international events should disturb him now, when there were other things to consider. When there was Grace, with her strawberry mouth …

‘Jake, are you all right?’ Nathaniel asked.

He said stiffly, ‘Perfectly. I don’t believe there should be a war. I don’t believe that men should go out and kill each other over an Archduke or Serbian sovereignty or anything else. There should be some other way, some civilized way. Men should be able to demonstrate that they have higher instincts than animals fighting over their territory.’ He was reminded of the Mammals, and the Pitt-Rivers, and Grace’s breath clouding the glass of the display case. He was made even angrier by the realization that his face and neck were crimson, and that Hugo was eyeing him with superior amusement.

Nathaniel said gently, ‘I think you are right, Jake. But I do not believe that very many people share our views.’

At last the evening was over. Jake escaped to his bed, but there was no refuge in sleep. He lay in the darkness, rigid and sweating, envying Julius’s oblivious even breaths from the opposite bed. He could only think of Grace lying in her own bed, in her white nightgown with her hair streaming out over the pillow, just a few yards away.

She is your cousin, he told himself hopelessly. Almost your sister. But she had come to seek him out in the boot room, and there had been that precious, inflammatory kiss …

Jake groaned in his misery and rolled over on to his stomach. He did not touch himself, although he knew that there were men who did, plenty of them at school. But they had been issued with severe warnings, some more explicit than others, and Jake had been disposed to believe them.

The pressure of the mattress made it worse. He rolled over again and pushed off the blankets so that he only felt the touch of the night air. It was already light when Jake finally fell asleep.

On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia and the first shots of the European conflict were fired.

John Leominster came from London to fetch Blanche. As always when his brother-in-law was at hand, Nathaniel became noticeably more beetle-browed and clever and Germanic. After so many years of marriage the sisters had become adept at defusing the tension between their husbands with inconsequential talk, but on this sombre evening the only real topic was the likelihood of Britain entering the war. After the long-drawn-out family dinner Jake wandered away, but Hugo and John retired with Nathaniel to his study. Nathaniel poured whisky and soda, diluting Hugo’s until it was almost colourless and Hugo blinked in protest.

‘This can’t be easy for you, Hirsh,’ John said.

‘It isn’t easy for any of us. War does not have the reputation of ease.’

‘I meant for you in particular, with your, ah, antecedents.’

John Leominster knew quite well that Levi and Dora Hirsh had settled in Manchester from Bremen in the mid 1860s. Levi was a scientist, an industrial chemist, and he had prospered with England’s manufacturing prosperity. Levi and Dora had family spread across most of Europe, but after fifty years they would not have considered themselves anything but English.

‘My antecedents? I was born here, Leominster. I am as British as you are, my dear fellow.’

It was a favourite tease of Nathaniel’s. Leominster could trace his descent from Henry VII and his pale face darkened with annoyance now. ‘Not quite, but let us not argue about it.’

‘By all means not. More whisky, old chap?’

Hugo held up his glass too. ‘What do you think will happen, uncle?’

Nathaniel sighed, relinquishing the pleasure of baiting Leominster. ‘I think Britain will be at war with Germany in a matter of days. I feel great sadness for Germany and the German people, and for all of Europe. I feel the most sorrow for Jake, and you, even Julius. It will not be a short war, Hugo. You need not be afraid that you will miss it.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I shall join just as soon as I can, in any case.’

John put down his glass. ‘You may enlist when you are eighteen, Hugo, not before. I shall be proud to send you off then.’

Hugo asked eagerly, ‘And Jake? Jake is only seven months younger than I am.’

‘Jake must speak for himself, Hugo. But I understand that he feels as I do, that it should not be necessary for civilized peoples to kill and maim one another’s young men, and to leave a whole generation lying bleeding on some battlefield. I do not believe that Jake will want to go and slaughter his German cousins, and I am ashamed of the politicians and the leaders who will oblige him to make such a decision. I pray that he will have the courage to do what he believes is right, and I am sure he will find a way to be of service to our country.’

Nathaniel stood up, slowly, as if he was tired, and replaced the whisky decanter on the tray on his desk. The top of the desk was a drift of papers covered with his tiny handwriting, and he seemed to gaze longingly at it.

The Lords Leominster and Culmington exchanged glances. ‘And to show the damned Kaiser that Britain means business,’ Leominster muttered.

Nathaniel was still looking at his papers. There was the ordered world of scholarship, beckoning him. He put his hand up to rub his beard around his mouth where grey fronds were beginning to show amongst the wiry black. ‘If you wish,’ Nathaniel said absently.

‘Where is Jake?’ Hugo demanded.

‘I don’t know. I think Jake has problems of his own, just at present.’

Jake was standing at the upstairs landing window, looking down from one of the unpredictable angles of the house to the Woodstock Road below. A gas lamp on top of a tall iron post beyond the gate threw light on the evergreen shrubs beside the gate and tipped the points of the iron railings that bounded the front garden. A cyclist swooped silently past, and for an instant the street lamp laid a monster’s wavering shadow on the road before him.

Jake was not thinking about the war, or reflecting on duty and service to his country. He was wondering what his cousin Hugo did in circumstances like his own. Hugo was fond of hinting that he was a man of the world, but Jake couldn’t work out what that meant. He didn’t know either whether it was more Culmington nobly to resist temptation and think pure thoughts, or not to think at all and so avoid anxiety, as well as shame and guilt. Jake was not sure that there was any way of asking Hugo.

It was soothing to be alone in the dark, at least. He had been with Grace for most of the day, but he had never been alone with her for a second. Clio was always there, however mutely Jake willed her to take herself off. And Julius too; Julius had stayed close to them, seeing everything and saying nothing. For the first time, there was a break in the magic circle.

Jake sighed. There had been no chance to exchange a private word with Grace, let alone another kiss, a caress. They had contented themselves with looks. And he had seen that Grace looked happy, with rosier cheeks and brighter eyes than when she had arrived.

Perhaps that was enough, Jake thought. With the tender new concern he felt for her he wanted Grace to be happy as much as he wanted his own happiness. But his own happiness, or satisfaction at least, seemed to depend on the unthinkable. He remembered the boot room again, and the smell of galoshes and waterproofs and the taste of Grace. It was better that she should be happy, he told himself, and that he should suffer. It was the only solution, Culmington or otherwise.

Eleanor came up the stairs on her way to bed and saw Jake silhouetted at the window. He did not hear her approach and he jumped violently when she spoke.

‘Jakie, what is it? Is it the war?’

‘Yes,’ Jake lied. ‘The war.’ Even in his mother’s face he saw the shape of Grace’s features. Eleanor and Blanche and Clio. Sisters, family. And yet.

‘I was proud of what you said,’ Eleanor told him.

Jake found that he could barely remember what it was he had said. Some pompous diatribe about man’s higher instincts. Upon which, he thought, he was hardly in a position to pronounce.

‘But you are only sixteen. You are only a boy, Jake. Going to fight is for men, and so is taking the decision not to fight.’

Jake mumbled, ‘I know. I’m quite all right. I’m not worried about it.’

Eleanor put her hand up to his face. Jake stood a head taller than her; she wondered exactly when it was that this unfathomable man had emerged from the soft pupa of her child. He suffered her caress stiffly.

‘Go to bed now,’ Eleanor sighed.

Jake went obediently, and lay thinking about Grace.

By August 4, Britain was at war with Germany.

News came of crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, cheering and singing the national anthem. Hugo pored over the newspapers that carried pictures of young men flocking to recruiting offices. He ached with impatience to join them, and sighed over his misfortune in being just too young. The prospect of having to return to school for the next half while other men marched to glory filled him with despair.

It was odd to find that outwardly, visibly, nothing changed. The cousins discovered that Oxford looked exactly as it always did in the middle of the Long Vacation. The High was deserted except for plodding dons and dons’ wives shopping, and only the windows of the mens’ outfitters replaced their displays of academic robes and College ties with military tunics and officers’ caps. North Oxford drowsed beneath its canopies of trees, and there was the summer round of tennis parties and picnics and croquet games, no different from any other year.

Jake bore the sociable routine half impatiently and half gladly because it occupied the four of them and allowed him to be harmlessly near to Grace. Grace was very lively. Her vivacity made Clio look like her smaller shadow.

There were no more meetings in the boot room, because Grace did not look for the opportunities. Jake realized that he was shadowing her like a patient dog, hoping for a scrap of intimacy. She rewarded him with private smiles, and with the touch of her hand sometimes, when no one else was looking. He was tormented by the inadequacy of their contacts, and at the same time relieved that he did not have to control himself as he would if they were to find themselves alone.

The long days of August passed quickly, even for Hugo in the agony of his inactivity.

At the end of the month there was a picnic beside the river at Iffley, when the Hirshes and their cousins were joined by Dr Harris and his wife and small children. Nathaniel and Oswald Harris spread rugs and a white linen cloth in the shade of the trees, and Eleanor and Mary Harris unpacked wicker baskets and spooned raspberries into glass dishes. The small children ran and fell over in the grass, and Hugo and Jake and Julius swam in the river. Their shouts and splashings were swallowed prematurely by the still, heavy air. Nathaniel predicted that the day would end with a thunderstorm.

Clio and Grace, in white dresses and straw sunhats, walked arm in arm along the footpath. Grace unravelled coarse strands of goose-grass from the hedge and twisted them into sticky garlands for their straw hats.

‘You look like a girl in a painting,’ she told Clio. ‘Raspberry juice on your chin and leaves in your hair. It ought to be red wine, and vine leaves, and you could pose for Bacchus. He is the god of wine, isn’t he?’

‘Revelry, as well. He’s Dionysus in Greek. Painters give him crowns of grapes and vine leaves, yes.’ When she had delivered her speech Clio regretted her pedantry, but Grace seemed as always to be glad of the information.

‘Mmm, you’ll do for him, then. What shall I be?’

‘Helen of Troy,’ Clio said. She would have gone on to make some wry observation on the distinction between her brother and Paris, but Grace good-humouredly interrupted her. Grace didn’t seem to know anything about Helen of Troy.

‘Listen, Dr Harris is calling. They must want us for something.’ She held out her arm again and Clio took it. There was no sense in being resentful of Grace. Grace herself did not harbour resentment. But then, Clio reflected, she had no reason to.

Oswald Harris was directing preparations for a wide game. He waved his arms in excitable sweeps, ordering children in different directions. Hugo forgot his dignity and ran with Julius and Clio and the Harris children.

‘You are the quarry,’ Dr Harris called after them. ‘Run, now.’

He turned back to the depleted circle gathered around the remains of the picnic. ‘Jake and Grace, you are the hunters. Give them five minutes exactly.’

They waited, not looking at each other, paying exaggerated attention to counting the seconds.

Eleanor and Mary Harris leant against the trunk of an elm tree, talking in low voices. A little distance away Nathaniel lay on the rug, propped on one elbow. Tabby had fallen asleep beside him, and he had placed his old panama hat to shade her head. He was watching Alice who made little lunging rushes to and fro through the tufts of tall grass. He saw her tilt her head backwards to follow the flight of a white butterfly, and as it rose she leant too far backwards and overbalanced. She lay on her back, staring at the sky from under the brim of her cotton sunbonnet. The butterfly still hovered above her, and in her fascination she forgot to cry.

Nathaniel saw the wide meadow dotted with sheaves of corn, and the willows on the opposite bank of the river, and Jake vaulting the gate into the next field before opening it to let Grace through. He heard the women murmuring, and the creak and splash of a skiff on the river, and one of the Harris children, a long way off, calling a taunt to the hunters.

Along the borders of Eastern Prussia, the Russian soldiers of General Samsonov’s Second Army were being cut down by German shellfire. With the sun hot on his bare head and the afternoon’s warmth beginning to build into oppressive stillness, Nathaniel imagined the thunder of the guns, and the stench of burning, and sudden death.

The same world contained these two realities: the picnic and the battlefield, and Nathaniel knew that the threads that bound them together were tightening, drawing them closer every day.

At home in London the exhibition hall at Olympia had been converted into a camp for aliens. Hundreds of Germans living in England had been rounded up and imprisoned there, and many more had suffered the ransacking of their homes on suspicion of being enemy spies. Only two days earlier, a policeman had come to visit Nathaniel. He had left his bicycle leaning against the stone steps leading up to the front door in the Woodstock Road, and when the outraged housemaid had shown him into Nathaniel’s study he had stood awkwardly on the threshold, turning his helmet over and over in his hands.

‘I’m sorry, Professor Hirsh,’ he kept saying.

‘What do you want to do?’ Nathaniel asked him. ‘Search this room for coded messages to General von Hindenburg? Arrest me for treason?’ The conversations he had had with John Leominster seemed prophetic now, not comical at all.

‘Of course not, sir,’ the man said miserably. ‘It’s a matter of formality. It’s this DORA, isn’t it?’

Nathaniel wondered what else the powers of the Defence of the Realm Act might bring, and what his children would have to suffer for bearing a name that he was proud of.

In the sunny meadow he scrambled to his feet and ran to where Alice lay on the grass. He scooped her up and touched his lips to the warm baby flesh at the back of her neck.

‘I love you,’ he murmured to her. ‘Ich liebe dich.’

Jake and Grace stood face to face in an angle of the hedge, hidden from the world by a green buttress of hawthorn branches.

‘I love you,’ Jake said hotly. The taunting calls of their hidden quarry filled the heavy air like the cries of birds. Jake didn’t care about anything except Grace, and the dampness of her skin under the weight of her hair, and the pulse of her throat just above the white collar of her dress. He fixed his eyes on the fluttering beat of it.

‘Jake …’

She touched his face, and then his black hair, still slick and wet with river water. The gesture reminded him of his mother’s and he snatched her wrist and held it.

‘Don’t say anything,’ he begged her. ‘Just be here. Just like this …’

He put his hands around her waist. It was narrow, the fragility of her body surprised and stirred him. He could feel the curve of her ribs, and the soft small swellings above. His hands rested there, he didn’t dare to move them, and he was afraid that his knees would give way beneath him.

Jake bent his head, darkening her face with his own shadow. He touched her mouth with his own and his tongue found her teeth like a barrier, and then she opened her mouth and it was hotter and wetter than his own. He kissed her, drinking her in as if he had been dying of thirst.

Her head fell back, baring her throat, and her straw hat with its wilting Dionysian garland dropped off and lay at their feet.

Grace almost toppled under his leaning weight but he caught her, and they half fell and half lay down in the grass under their hawthorn hedge. Jake pressed himself on top of her, and his hands found the hem of her white dress, and the folds of her petticoat, all the mysterious layers of feminine apparel, and then the little mound between her legs, tight and innocent like the smooth rump of a small animal.

‘Jake, Jake,’ Grace was almost screaming. For an instant she was stronger than he was. She pushed him aside and scrambled up, snatching her crushed hat from beneath him. There was grass caught in her hair and in the tucks of her dress. She crammed her hat on her tumbled hair and ran away, towards the voices, her own cry rising to theirs, ‘Coming to find you. Coming to find you.’

Jake rolled on to his side and lay staring through the stalks of grass, reduced to the same level as the insects that crossed his limited field of vision. The grass was damp against his cheek, but he was sticky with heat and he found that he was panting for breath. He lay still until his breathing steadied again, watching the miniature world inches from his face.

The voices were a long way off now; he knew that he was alone. Grace had run away from him, and a kind of carelessness replaced his anxiety. He found that he didn’t mind that she was gone, that he was even relieved. Dreamily, still watching the waving blades of grass, Jake undid his clothes. It felt indecent to be exposed in the open air, in daylight, but the air was deliciously cool. He stretched out, flattening himself against the earth, his thoughts stilled.

He closed his fingers around himself, tentatively at first, and then with a firmer grasp.

After a month, a long month of suppressing himself, it did not take much. He was not thinking of Grace, or of anything at all except obeying his instincts. The pleasure of the orgasm raced all through his body, wave after wave, but the satisfaction and relief that followed it was better. It was like a blessing. His limbs felt heavy and soft, like a baby’s, and he curled on his side listening to the empty air.

Jake opened his eyes again on the grass world, and then on the sky over his head. Heavy, piled clouds had rolled over the sun, but the margins of them were still rimmed with gold. He smiled, and raised himself on one elbow, then sat up and spread his arms until the joints cracked. He saw that there were pearly drops on the grass where he had been lying, bending the blades of grass. They didn’t look ugly, or unnatural, or in any way unclean. They seemed shiny and quite innocent. Jake waited for the waves of guilt to come, echoing the pleasure, but nothing did. He only felt calm, and comfortable.

He stood up then, buttoning his trousers up. Then he bent down and tore some handfuls of the long grass, and dropped them over the evidence of himself in the sheltered angle of the hawthorn hedge. He felt light and springy, full of energy. He had done nothing wrong, it occurred to him. He was right, and all the murky advice and warnings he had been given were wrong.

He lifted his head and called loudly, ‘Coming to find you.’

Nathaniel had been right about the thunderstorm. It broke in the early evening, sending Tabby and the housemaids scuttling to Nanny in the nursery and making Alice break out in wails of uncomprehending protest.

Clio and Grace sat in their bedroom while the rain drummed on the roof and bounced in fat drops off the streaming Woodstock Road. Grace was humming and brushing Clio’s hair, long rhythmic strokes that made it spark and crackle. In his room, Julius was practising the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Clio loved the music but Julius kept breaking off in the same bar, repeating a handful of phrases with his perfectionist’s concentration.

‘Your hair is prettier than mine,’ Grace said, breaking off from her humming. ‘It’s silkier. I’ll give it one hundred more brushes, and it will shine.’

Clio sighed languorously. She felt happier this evening than she had done since the beginning of the holiday. Jake and Grace had appeared separately during the game; they could have been together but she was sure they had not. Jake had looked ordinary, too, instead of always covertly peering at Grace and then glancing hastily away in case anyone noticed him doing it.

Grace herself had been friendly, perhaps a little quieter than usual. Clio thought that the atmosphere between them all was as it used to be, except that Julius watched what went on and said nothing.

The intimacy created by the storm and the hairbrushing and Grace’s humming made Clio feel bold, and she said, ‘I think it’s stupid, all the boy and girl business. Like you and Jake sighing and staring at each other. It spoils everything.’

There were two or three more brush strokes, and silence, while Grace seemed to consider. Then she laughed, putting the hairbrush down and leaning over Clio’s shoulder so that she could see their twin reflections in the mirror. ‘Do you know what? I think you’re right. It does spoil everything.’

In a month, since the Pitt-Rivers day, she had seen Jake change from the admirable leader and innovator she had hero-worshipped almost from babyhood into a duller, slower twin of himself. Jake blushed now, and hovered awkwardly, and tried to catch her in corners. She wanted to be admired and singled out and even kissed, but by the old glamorous Jake, not the new hesitant one. And then today, when he did catch her, he hadn’t acted as he was supposed to act. Grace wasn’t exactly sure how that was, except to do homage to her in some way, perhaps kneeling down, perhaps eloquently declaring that he would love her for ever, would go to the war and fight and die for her sake.

Instead he had frightened her, and she had frightened herself. She wasn’t supposed to feel like that, when he touched her there, was she? She had run away, run in real terror, back to the other children and the rules of the game.

It was cosy in Clio’s bedroom with the two white beds turned down and the night-light burning on the table between them. Clio would turn it out when they went to sleep, but for now it gave the room the look of the old night-nursery at Stretton.

Grace picked up the hairbrush again and began the long smooth strokes through her cousin’s hair. Clio looked pleased and Grace smiled over her shoulder at her reflection. ‘Look at us. We are alike, aren’t we?’

Clio did look, at Grace’s face behind her own, a pale moon in the dim room. The rain was still hammering down outside.

She said, ‘I don’t know. I suppose we are, a little.’

The same night, in bed listening to the rain, Jake repeated what he had done under the hawthorn hedge. The sensation was less surprising and so even more pleasurable, but it was the sense of calm and relief afterwards that affected him most strongly. He knew that he would sleep, and that images of Grace and Clio and even Blanche and Eleanor would not rise up to torment and reproach him. His bed felt soft and safe, like arms wrapped around him. He began to speculate drowsily about his own unpredictable body, quiescent at last, however temporarily. He realized that he knew almost nothing about what made it work, or why he had been obliged to suffer for a month, or why it was considered wrong or dangerous or wicked to do what he had just done, so simply and satisfyingly. He knew even less about Grace’s body, even though he had speculated furtively about it for so many leaden days. What did Grace feel, what did Grace know? He did feel ashamed that he had frightened her.

And yet, Jake thought, he knew Latin and classical Greek, and the planets of the solar system, and algebra and trigonometry, and the countries of the world and their rivers and mountains and principal exports. Why such ignorance about himself, his own insistent flesh and blood?

Just before he fell asleep, an idea came to him.

In the morning he found Nathaniel in the breakfast room, The Times folded beside his plate. They were the first members of the household to come down. Jake helped himself to ham and eggs from the silver dish on the sideboard and sat down beside his father. He ate hungrily, watching Nathaniel frowning over the news from Europe. Then he said, ‘May we discuss something, Pappy?’

Nathaniel put his newspaper aside. ‘Of course.’

‘I have been thinking about what I should do. It’s time I had an idea. Even Hugo knows that he wants to be a soldier.’

‘Even Hugo,’ Nathaniel agreed seriously.

‘I would like to study medicine. I should like to be a doctor.’

‘You have never talked about this before.’

‘I have been thinking. I know something about so many things, and nothing about myself. Anatomy, physiology, chemistry. It came to me that nothing would interest me more than to learn, and then to apply that knowledge. The world will need doctors. I could be a doctor, not a soldier.’

Nathaniel looked hard at him. He had been thinking that Jake had shaken off his preoccupation of the last weeks, regained his old animation. Whatever his problem had been with Grace, he must have found the answer to it. Nathaniel trusted his son enough to be certain that it was the right answer.

He said, ‘If you are serious, I think it is a fine idea. I will talk to the medical man at College.’

Jake beamed at him, as pleased as a small boy. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. He went back to the sideboard and mounded his plate with a second helping of ham and eggs.

Nathaniel turned back to his newspaper, but the grey print blurred. He was thinking about Julius and hoping that when his turn came for Grace’s attention, if it did come, he would deal with it as sensibly as Jake had done.