Читать книгу All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 8

Blanche followed her housekeeper through the enfilade of rooms that ran along the south front of Stretton. The long vista was dim because the shutters were closed. The few bright beams of sunshine that pierced the cracks and fell across their path seemed solid enough to trip her, much more solid than the furniture invisible and shapeless under its dust-covers. She stepped through one of the golden rods, and the finger of it ran over her face and then fell back over the floor behind her.

Blanche had flinched when the beam of sunlight touched her. She was thinking of Hugo, who had gone at last to join his regiment in France.

She knew that he would be killed, she knew it with unshakeable certainty, and when she thought of him, as now, the air itself seemed to bruise her with its weight of terror.

Blanche had to force herself to concentrate on Mrs Dixey’s broad back marching in front of her, to harness her thoughts to Stretton and these dim shuttered rooms. They were closing them up until the end of the war.

If the day ever comes, Blanche thought. And if I could close up the fear, as if it were the saloon or the yellow drawing room …

‘The china from these rooms is all packed in the chests now, my lady,’ the housekeeper said. ‘And stored in the billiard room, like you ordered.’

‘Very good,’ Blanche said automatically. The silver had been taken away to the security vaults, and the better pictures had been lifted down from the walls. There were darker rectangles on the faded silks and damasks, showing the places where generations of Strettons had stared down on their successors.

But in the saloon, the Sargent portrait still hung in its accustomed place. John Leominster himself had given the order for it to be left. ‘I like to know it’s there,’ he had said gruffly. ‘In the place where it belongs, even if nothing else is.’

Blanche had not asked him why, because to ask or answer such a question would not be part of their expectations of each other, but she guessed that he thought of it as a kind of talisman. Perhaps he attached some superstitious importance to it, imagining that the old, pre-war order it seemed to stand for would somehow exert its benign influence over Hugo’s fate.

She paused beneath the picture now, looking up into the innocent faces. As if it could, she thought bitterly. As if a society portrait of two silly girls could have any effect on Hugo in the trenches.

But even as she dismissed the picture she felt a wave of longing for the days it recalled, for the measured, orderly pre-war times that she was afraid were gone for ever. Her own bright painted face, and Eleanor’s mirror of it, seemed to belong to a different generation.

‘Not this portrait, you know,’ Clio had said once to Elizabeth Ainger, during one of her rambling monologues.

Elizabeth had barely glanced up at the picture that hung behind the old lady’s velvet chair. It was the work of a painter no longer very much admired, and she did not herself care for the violent expressionistic style. She knew the history of it, from family stories, and its title. The Janus Face. That was all.

‘I’m talking about the Sargent,’ Clio went on. ‘His portrait of Eleanor and Blanche. The Misses Holborough.’

‘I know,’ Elizabeth said. The Stretton family had sold the picture in the Fifties and it was now housed in a private collection in Baltimore. She had never seen the famous Sargent itself, only reproductions of it. She had suggested to her publishers that they might try to obtain permission to use the double portrait as a frontispiece for the book.

It was a pity, she thought, that the later picture, the one of Grace and Clio, was not more attractive or at least more celebrated.

‘This picture, the one of me and … and your grandmother, was intended to hang at Stretton alongside the other. But old John Leominster never liked it, and your …’

Clio paused and squinted sideways at Elizabeth, smiling a little. Elizabeth thought that she looked very old, and rather mad.

‘… the painter refused to sell it to him. He loaned it to my father, and there it stayed, in the Woodstock Road, for years and years.’

Clio’s head fell forward then, so that her chin seemed to touch her chest, and Elizabeth thought she might have fallen into one of her sudden sleeps. She could see the shape of her skull under the thin hair and paper skin, and she was touched with pity for her.

But then the skull-head jerked up again, and the surprisingly bright eyes flicked to her. ‘Such a lot of years, eh? Why are you interested in so much long-ago, forgotten nonsense?’

‘It’s my trade,’ Elizabeth answered, ‘I’m a biographer.’

The pity was still with her and she could not make herself say, ‘your biographer’.

Blanche turned her back on the mocking optimistic faces. She looked around the shadowy saloon again, up at the great glass chandelier that had been swathed in burlap, and at the ghostly shapes of gilt chairs and console tables under their dust-sheets.

The huge house seemed already dead. The clocks had been allowed to run down and not even their ticking disturbed the silence. Blanche imagined that she could hear the dust settling.

In September 1916 John Leominster had decided that it was his patriotic duty to free as many men as possible from his house and estate to help with the war effort. From the outbreak of the war the house had been run by a minimum of staff, but now Stretton was being entirely closed up. The land and the farms would be left in the care of a manager who would oversee the growth of food crops, and the family was migrating to London, to the Belgrave Square house.

‘You have done a very good job, Mrs Dixey, you and the men.’

The butler and two of the footmen, all too old for active service, were accompanying the family to Belgrave Square. Mrs Dixey and her husband, in their quarters at the far end of one wing, would be left as the sole guardians of a hundred lifeless rooms.

‘Thank you, my lady,’ Mrs Dixey said.

They hesitated, unbalanced for an instant in their familiar relation to each other by this dislocation of the house. The housekeeper saw the expression in Blanche’s eyes and understood it, because two of her own boys were in France. She wanted to put out her hand to touch her employer’s arm and say, ‘God will watch them for us.’ But she knew her place too well and stood silently instead, waiting to see if there would be any more instructions.

Blanche sighed. John was waiting for her in his office. ‘I think that will be all,’ she said. She crossed beneath the portrait without looking at it and walked slowly back over the thin bars of light.

John was sitting at his desk, staring into the pigeonholes with their neat sheaves of paper, but when Blanche came in his face lightened. He stood up and put out his hands to rest on her shoulders, then drew her closer to him. Blanche let her head droop until it rested against him. They stood still, finding comfort in one another.

Blanche and John had not founded their marriage on words, because John had never been able to express his thoughts or feelings. Instead, Blanche had learnt to interpret the different languages of their silence. She knew that he heard her fear, and shared it with her. She began to cry helplessly, her face pressed against the rough tweed of his coat.

Upstairs in the schoolroom, Grace was sitting alone on the floor. Nanny had taken eight-year-old Phoebe away to the nursery, to select whatever books and toys must be packed up and sent by the carrier to the London house. She had given Grace instructions to prepare her own belongings, as well as Thomas’s, who had returned to his prep school.

But Grace had not even opened the doors of any of the tall, brown-varnished cupboards that lined the room. She sat in a patch of sunlight with her legs stretched out in front of her, scanning the familiar surroundings.

At the old desk she had sat to listen to Miss Alcott, or one of her predecessors, stifling her yawns over the atlas or the French grammar. She wondered, if all the minutes were added together, how many hours of her life she must have spent staring out of the window, over the trees of the park towards the brown hills.

When they were both very small, she had had Hugo for company. But then Hugo had gone away to school, and all through the long termtimes she had suffered the governess alone. She had always hated her isolation and the unfairness of what she considered to be her imprisonment. The Babies had been no consolation. Even now, at eleven, Thomas was no more than an infuriating little boy.

Grace smiled suddenly. The holidays had been different. The holidays had always meant the Hirsh cousins, and when they were all at Stretton this room had been their headquarters.

She scrambled to her feet now, and went over to the desk. It had a sloping wooden seat, worn shiny, connected to the desk part by braces of cast iron. The metal had been rubbed shiny too, by her own restless feet. Grace lifted the white china inkwell out of its round hole and turned it upside down. The ink had dried out, and Miss Alcott was gone. Grace was fifteen, and she was finished with the schoolroom.

She lifted the lid of the desk. One wet afternoon Jake had carved his initials with a penknife. She could see his face now, his tongue protruding slightly as he worked and a thick lock of black hair falling into his eyes. Grace ran her fingertips over the JNH. The letters were deep, and even. Julius had taken the knife from him after that. JEH was fainter, scratched rather than carved, but with curlicues extending from the arms of the H. Grace followed the flourishes of them with her fingernail, her eyes half closing.

After that it had been the girls’ turn. They had bickered about who was to go first, and then they had carved their semi-alphabets with laborious care. GEACS and CBAGH. Clio’s carving was better than her own, Grace saw now.

When the initials were all complete Jake had taken a pair of dividers and scratched a circle to enclose them all, the magic circle.

‘Grace? What are you doing?’

It was Nanny, calling from the nursery. Very gently, Grace traced the circle and then she lowered the desk lid, hiding the carvings once more.

‘Packing,’ she answered.

Grace didn’t want to move to London. The London house was gloomy, and the rush of the city outside seemed only to emphasize her isolation within it. Grace understood her own position perfectly well. She was too old for the schoolroom and too young to go out in Society, even the restricted version of Society that was all the war allowed. She knew that she was facing a prospect of suitable war-work under Blanche’s supervision; days of packing dressings for the Red Cross, or knitting socks, with walks in Hyde Park and tea with the daughters of Blanche’s friends regarded as adequate diversions.

Grace wished she had been born a boy. Then she could go to the front, like Hugo. She was quite sure that Hugo would come home again, so certain of it that she did not even bother to try to define why. He would come home, probably with a medal, and all the glory would be heaped on him.

There was no glory in rolling bandages. There was no glory, Grace thought, in any of the things she might do.

She wandered to the window and looked down. The trees showed the first yellow and ochre of autumn. Soon the frosts would come and there would be the scent of woodsmoke and apples, but she would be in London looking out into Belgrave Square.

It isn’t fair. I wish I were someone else.

It was a new sensation, for Grace, to be dissatisfied with her position in life. Until now she had always felt able to direct matters to suit herself, to arrange the world according to her own requirements. But she understood suddenly how small the world of her childhood had been, and realized that she was about to exchange that world for an adult one, no bigger and circumscribed by propriety and convention.

Grace lifted one fist and banged it against the glass of the schoolroom window. Then, out loud, she said the worst word she knew. The pointless syllable fell away into silence.

‘When will this war be over?’ she demanded of the empty room. She meant, When will everything else begin? Impatience budded inside her like an ulcer.

‘Grace, you haven’t done one single thing.’

In the doorway, Phoebe appeared and Nanny Brodribb behind her, standing with her hands on her hips. Grace knew that meant she was angry. She also knew that she could easily wheedle her back into a good humour.

‘Please, Broddy, will you start on it for me? I don’t know where to begin. I just want to go downstairs for five minutes and then I’ll be back, I truly promise.’

‘Will you, now?’

Grace went, leaving Phoebe clicking her tongue in imitation of Nanny. ‘Grace is very lazy,’ she heard her say.

The marble stairway that circled under the central dome was littered with woodshavings, curled like severed pigtails, and the wide marble expanse of the floor below was cluttered with boxes. An old man in a green baize apron was labelling each crate. Grace loved Stretton and had never considered that it would not stay the same for ever. She hated to see it dismantled like this, being packed away like a Whit Monday fairground.

She found her parents in her father’s study. As she hesitated at the door and saw them turn away from each other it occurred to her that they might have been embracing. The notion was embarrassing, and she forgot it as quickly as she could. She also saw that Blanche had been crying. The tears were for Hugo, of course. Grace shrugged, awkwardly, wanting to reassure her out of her own fund of certainty that Hugo would not be killed, but there was something in her mother’s defeatism that irritated her and diffused her sympathy.

‘Yes, Grace, what is it?’ John said. He had never been easy with his daughters.

As meekly as she could, Grace asked, ‘I wondered if I might go to Oxford, to be with Clio. Instead of staying by myself in London?’

John was never in favour of other people’s suggestions, particularly his children’s, and he stared at her now as if she had suggested removing to Australia. ‘What can you mean? You will not be by yourself. Your mother and I will be there, and your sister, and Thomas in the school holidays. As well as the rest of the household.’

Blanche looked at her daughter. She had expected that Grace would grow up to be calm and controlled, and pliant where necessary, but Grace was none of those things. She was eager and strong-willed, and so full of impatience and the taste of her own needs that Blanche was sometimes afraid she might split her own skin, showing the soft pulp beneath like a ripe fruit.

‘I think Aunt Eleanor has enough to worry about.’

Except that her sons were safe. Jacob had kept to his declaration of pacifism. He had deferred his entry into medical school and was serving in France as an orderly in a field hospital. Julius was on the point of entering the Royal College of Music.

‘She wouldn’t need to worry about me. Perhaps I could help her. Perhaps I could even go to Clio’s school for a few months. Until the war is over.’

‘I don’t know,’ Blanche said.

Grace did. She also knew when to save her ammunition. She smiled acquiescently now. ‘Well, perhaps,’ she said. She went back upstairs to the big brown cupboards and began laying out her own possessions and Thomas’s ready for transporting to London and Oxford.

Julius and Clio sat on a bench underneath the walnut tree in the garden at Woodstock Road. They were reading, and they sat turned inwards towards each other, their profiles identically inclined over their books. Grace had no book, and she had already walked the flagged paths between Eleanor’s flowerbeds.

‘You are very lucky,’ Grace said to Clio. ‘Do you know how lucky you are?’

The twins looked up at her, and it seemed to Grace that they smiled the same patient smile.

Grace had never felt jealous of Clio before. She had envied her the relative freedom of life in the Oxford house, and the constant company of her brothers, and her easy confident store of knowledge, but she had never before thought that it would be preferable to be Clio Hirsh than to be Lady Grace Stretton.

But now, it seemed, Clio had everything that she did not.

Jake was no longer at home, of course, but Clio still had Julius, and the bond between the twins had strengthened since Jake had gone away. When Blanche set her free at last, on a long visit to the Oxford family, Grace had plenty of time to observe her cousins. Watching them, seeing how comfortable they were together and how they seemed to know without speaking what the other was thinking, Grace felt her own solitude like an affliction. She wished that she could share the same intimacy with someone.

She found herself reaching out to Clio, on this visit, as she had never done before.

Without even admitting it to herself, Grace had begun to dismantle the old barriers. She stopped trying to be better, or quicker, or louder, and she started to follow Clio’s lead. She wanted to be like a sister, like a third twin to Clio and Julius, instead of merely sharing the accident of a birthday.

Since the beginning of the war Clio had grown up and away from Grace, who knew she had done no more than mark time in the schoolroom at Stretton. Unlike Grace, with her undirected impatience and energy, Clio had acquired a sense of purpose. Encouraged by Nathaniel she had decided that she wanted to study for an Oxford degree in modern languages, and was planning to enter one of the women’s halls. She worked hard at her books, making Grace feel stupid and aimless in comparison.

Clio also had useful practical work to do. The house in the Woodstock Road was no longer filled with a stream of undergraduates coming to visit Nathaniel and to sit talking and arguing until Eleanor fed them. Most of the students had been swallowed up by the war and those few who remained were quieter and more jealous of their time. The house had seemed unnaturally empty and quiet until Eleanor had offered it as a convalescent home for wounded officers.

The men came in twos and threes, physically more or less repaired but in need of rest, and comfort, and security. Eleanor and Clio nursed them, but they also talked and read to them, and Julius played chess, and Tabby and Alice ran in and out of their rooms, and so the men were drawn into the family. They seemed to thrive in the warmth of it. Each time one of them became well enough to leave, the Hirshes said goodbye with as much affection as if he were a son or a brother.

Grace saw all this, and she admired it. She was always clear-sighted enough to know what was worthy of approval. She was generous in her open admiration of Clio, and Clio responded to her generosity.

For the first time Clio became the leader and arbiter, and in a matter of days she lost the layers of her own resentment and jealousy of Grace that had built up over all their years together. They became friends, knowing that they had never truly been friends before.

‘Why am I so lucky?’ Clio asked, still smiling. ‘I’ve got three pages of French translation to do, and an essay on Robespierre, and there’s an ink stain in the front of the skirt of my good dress.’

‘You’re a Hirsh, and a twin,’ Grace answered seriously.

They both knew how impossible such an acknowledgement would have been only a few months ago.

Clio slid sideways on the garden bench, drawing up her serge skirt to make room, and held out her hand to Grace.

‘You’re a Stretton. Sursum corda,’ she said. ‘Lift up your hearts’ was the Stretton family motto, and the cousins considered it appropriately Culmington. ‘And you are a twin.’

Julius had put his book down and he moved to one side too as Grace sat between them. He put his arm across her shoulder and Grace leant back, resting her head against the sleeve of his coat. She sighed, and then turned her face so that she could look up at him.

‘Am I, Julius?’

Julius contemplated the sheen of her pale skin, and the fine hairs at the tail end of her eyebrow, and the small vertical cleft beneath her lower lip that she had inherited from her father, and he knew that he loved her as much as he loved Clio, and that she filled a space in his life that was not sisterly at all, but much more intriguing and enchanting. He could not remember even how long he had loved her, but he knew the roots of it went a long way back, and deep within him, and that the love was very important to him, but it carried no sense of threat because he knew it was immutable.

‘Is that really what you want to be?’ he asked her, teasingly, because that was the language they used with one another.

Grace said, ‘Yes.’

‘Then consider it a fact,’ Julius told her.

‘Thank you.’ She lifted her head and kissed him on the cheek. Being physically close to Julius always made Grace feel happy. There was a wholesomeness about him that she liked very much. His olive-coloured skin smelt good, and he gave and received kisses and hugs quite naturally, as if they were a matter of course.

Jake did not, she remembered. Jake jumped and started as if something hurt him, and then he clutched with overheated hands and frightened her. When she was not frightened she recognized an avid, beseeching kind of eagerness in him. It embarrassed her, and made her want to laugh, and that was not what he wanted from her at all.

Jake and Grace had not seen very much of one another since the summer at the beginning of the war, and when they had met they had ignored the few opportunities of being alone together, as if by mutual agreement.

And yet, since he had been at the hospital in France, Jake had written to her three or four times. They were extraordinary letters that didn’t seem to speak with Jake’s familiar voice. Grace kept them tied with a piece of braid in a pocket of her writing case. She did not take them out to reread when a new letter came, but quickly undid the braid and then fastened it up again.

Grace kissed Clio too, and then sat back with satisfaction between the two of them. It was comfortable with Julius’s arm around her, and with Clio on the other side, companionable instead of challenging.

I was lonely, Grace thought, and now I’m not lonely. She felt sleepily grateful to Clio and Julius.

Clio picked up her book again. ‘May I finish my French, please?’

It was the middle of October and the lawns and flowerbeds were overlaid with a brown mosaic of fallen leaves, but the bench was sheltered by a high wall of red brick and the afternoon sun was warm. For once, Grace felt glad that there was nothing else to do but sit here, resting her head against Julius’s shoulder.

At the beginning of her visit, wanting to prove her good intentions, Grace had repeated her suggestion that she might perhaps accompany Clio to her day school in Oxford. But most of the girls were the studious daughters of dons, and Grace had seen at once from the reactions of Nathaniel and Clio herself that she would be hopelessly out of her depth in a class with her own age group. She had no desire to be relegated to studying with the twelve-year-olds, and so she added quickly, ‘But my father might not want that, and perhaps I could do something here for Aunt Eleanor that would be more useful than mathematics?’

‘Nothing is more useful than mathematics, except possibly Latin,’ Nathaniel had said severely. But the Hirshes had agreed that Grace would be a valuable assistant for Eleanor in looking after the convalescents. Lately it had become her job to lay trays and to hurry upstairs with them, to cut up food and to carry hot water in jugs, and to do whatever she could to save her aunt’s legs and the energies of the overworked housemaids.

The men liked Grace, although she did not find it easy to be relaxed and happy with them and to forget what they had suffered, as Clio seemed able to do.

The middle of the afternoon, once the luncheon trays had been cleared away, was the quiet part of the day. The convalescents were sleeping, or reading, and even Tabby and Alice were resting.

It was good, Grace reflected, to be busy enough to find a break in the afternoon sunshine so welcome.

Julius stirred beside her. ‘Are you asleep?’ he whispered.

‘No. Just thinking.’

Of all Grace’s moods and humours, and he could have listed a score without any effort, Julius liked her contemplative manner best. He felt closest to her then, as if they could exchange ideas without words, across some invisible membrane. ‘Serious thoughts?’

She smiled at once, skimming away from him. ‘Not very. Not at all.’

Clio jammed her fingers into her ears and hunched closer over her textbook. ‘I’m trying to work. Please.’

Julius lifted his arm from Grace’s shoulders, yawned, and stretched his long legs. ‘And I have to go and practise.’

Grace said, ‘May I come and listen?’ She liked to be the audience, sitting silently through the music and applauding when he reached the end of a piece. Sometimes Julius played to his audience of one, tucking his violin under his arm and making a deep bow, and sometimes he lost himself in the music and forgot her altogether.

‘You certainly may,’ Clio answered for him, and Julius and Grace laughed and walked back through the garden to the house.

Julius’s room was bare, like a monk’s cell. The papers and sheets of music on his table were laid in neat piles and squared off at right angles to each other. The covers on the iron-framed bed were drawn up with the same geometric precision. The only ornament was an engraving of the head of Mozart hanging on the wall next to the window.

Grace hesitated between the smooth bed and the upright chair in a corner, and opted for the chair. She sat down, straight-backed, and folded her hands in her lap.

Julius lifted his violin and tucked it beneath his chin. Grace saw how it became part of him. With the tip of his bow he indicated the sheet music on the music stand. ‘The Rondo Capriccioso, Camille Saint-Saëns,’ he announced formally. And then he added, ‘It’s rather difficult, in parts.’

It was one of the pieces his teacher had recommended he work up for his Royal College audition. The flying staccato run in E major still made him feel sweaty when he thought of it. ‘It calls for practice, Julius,’ his teacher had advised him. He took a breath now and lifted his bow.

Grace listened, intently at first, but then her attention began to wander. There was a fast section, where the notes seemed to climb and tumble over each other, and each time he played it Grace was sure that this time Julius would be satisfied with it and move on. But each time he broke off and jerked his bow away from the strings, closed his eyes to refocus his attention, and then began again, over and over.

Grace could not even hear what it was that displeased him.

She would have been incapable of such perfectionism herself. All her own instincts would have led her to scramble through the awkward passage somehow, anyhow, and then to hurry on, aiming for the end in one triumphant rush.

Julius stopped yet again, and patiently began one more time. He had forgotten she was there. She watched his face with its shuttered look of intense concentration.

She knew that Clio’s schoolfriends considered Julius to be handsome, and she had agreed with their judgement without giving it very much thought. Now, as she studied him with detachment through the skein of music, she noticed that he had heavy rounded eyelids that looked as if they might have been sculpted and a deep upper lip with a strongly defined margin, and that his perfectly harmonious features were more feminine than conventionally handsome. He looked like Clio, of course. And so there was much more than an echo of her own face in Julius’s. She had known it, but now she catalogued the similarities as if she had never been aware of them before, the colour of eyes and skin, the shape of mouth and ears and the height of cheekbones. Grace smiled faintly.

The music flowed on. This time, she realized, there was no stopping. The log jam of tumbling notes broke up and was carried away in the stream of the melody. Grace found herself leaning forward on her hard chair and willing him on, holding her breath for him as if it would help him to reach the release at the end of the piece.

The music swelled, filling her head and the bare room until she sat on the edge of her seat, her lips apart and her eyes fixed on Julius’s blind absorbed face. The echo of the last chord vibrated in the stillness before she realized it was finished, and then Julius raised his head and she saw his shining eyes. He was panting for breath.

‘Bravo,’ Grace shouted. She jumped off the chair and clapped her hands until the bones jarred. ‘Julius, bravo. That was wonderful.’

He nested his violin carefully in its case, then straightened up again. ‘It was better, anyway,’ he gasped.

‘No,’ Grace said seriously. ‘It was wonderful.’ She meant it, and he heard it in her voice, and he crooked his arm around her shoulders again.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Empty of the music, the room seemed very silent. They stood side by side, next to the window, looking down into the garden. Clio’s bent head was visible beneath the walnut tree at the far end, and beyond her were the trees of other gardens with bare branches beginning to poke through their faded summer covering, and the gables and slate roofs and brick chimneys of North Oxford. Grace liked the domesticity of this view, after the emptiness of Stretton Park and the grimy, pompous expanse of Belgrave Square. It amused her to imagine the blameless academic lives that were lived behind all the blandly shining windows.

Julius had no attention to spare for the view. He was too conscious of Grace’s warm shoulder and arm beneath his own. He had grown rapidly in the last year – he was taller even than Jake now – and he stood a head higher than Clio and Grace. Grace seemed very slight and fragile next to his own lumbering bulk. He turned his head very slightly, breathlessly, so that he could look down on the top of her dark head. Clio still wore her hair in a long plait that hung down her back, but Grace had put her hair up in a shiny, smooth roll that showed her ears. He could see the pink rim of her ear now, and the whiteness of her neck in the shadow of her blouse collar.

He felt a spasm of tenderness for her, and at the same time a startling, fierce determination that he would never allow anything to hurt her.

He moved round so that he stood in front of her, blocking out the vista of trees and rooftops. Grace looked up at him, her mouth opening a little, surprised but unafraid.

Julius wanted to take her face between his hands and hold it, so that he could study all the contours of it, but he felt too clumsy to trust himself. Instead he bent forward, slowly and stiffly, and kissed the corner of her mouth.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, afterwards.

‘I know it is,’ Grace answered. She was at ease with Julius. She didn’t feel any of the fear or fascination that Jake had set off inside her two summers ago. Julius was safe. His smooth skin smelt faintly of honey, she identified it now. He carried an aura of cleanliness with him. She knew that he loved her, and she loved him back, a love with clearly defined parameters.

Julius blushed. He was suffused with happiness that made him feel weak and light-headed, but he also felt quite calm and secure. There was no rush, no cause for anxiety. Grace was here, and there was plenty of time. If he had made himself analyse it he would not have been able to define what exactly there was time for, now or in the mysterious future, but the rush of happiness defeated logic. He wanted to lift Grace up in his arms and swing her round, laughing and shouting, but the knowledge of his own clumsiness restrained him again. Instead he reached out and touched her shoulder, near where the collar of her blouse folded against her throat. Immediately all the sensation in his body concentrated itself in his fingertips. The fabric semed ethereally soft, as if it might melt under his touch. He shook his head, slowly, in amazement.

Grace reached up and took his hand. She turned him gently so that they faced the window again, and then settled herself against him, in the crook of his arm. To Julius, the gesture seemed wonderfully natural and confiding. He held her and they went on looking out at the view together.

He didn’t know how long it was they stood there, but it seemed a long time.

At last, they heard Tabby running down the linoleum corridor outside the door. She was calling for Eleanor, and there was a clatter as she jumped three steps in the angle of the passage and skidded along the slippery stretch to the nursery. Another door slammed somewhere else in the house, and Grace and Julius remembered that they were not the only people in the world.

Grace stepped to one side and put her hands up to her hair, smoothing it where it was already smooth. Julius loved the womanly economy of the gesture. He was thinking, I will remember this, the look of her, the way she is outlined in the light against the window.

‘I must go and help Aunt Eleanor,’ she said.

Julius watched her go, and watched the door for a long moment after it had closed behind her. Then he picked up his violin again. He could play the Rondo now, he wasn’t afraid of it any longer.

Nathaniel came home, bringing the evening papers with him. Eleanor hurried to meet him as she always did, as soon as she heard his key in the lock. Their eyes met, telling one another, No bad news. Not yet. Only then did Nathaniel kiss her. Tabby and Alice came running and he lifted them up in turn and swung them in the air, growling like a bear to make them laugh and then scream to be put down again. Julius came more slowly down the stairs and Nathaniel clasped him briefly. They were the same height, now.

Evenings in the Woodstock Road belonged to the family. It was one of the things Grace particularly liked about staying with the Hirshes, that there had never been the starching and combing before the stiff half-hour visit to the drawing room that was always the routine at home.

Before dinner Eleanor and Nathaniel always sat in the big, comfortable room at the back of the house that looked down over a narrow wrought-iron balcony into the garden. Nathaniel sometimes played Pelmanism with the children, all of them ranged in a circle around the mahogany table. A lamp with a shade of multi-coloured glass threw flecks of different-coloured light on the ring of faces. On other evenings Eleanor played the piano or Julius his violin, and the children took it in turns to sing. Nathaniel particularly enjoyed the singing, and would join in in his resonant bass. His voice was so unsuited to the sentimental Victorian ballads that Eleanor favoured that the children would have to struggle to avoid collapsing into furtive giggles.

At other times there were the general knowledge games that Grace dreaded because she seemed to know even less than Tabby, and she would hurriedly suggest charades or recitations as a diversion. Jake’s special piece had always been a theatrical rendering of ‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’; when she closed her eyes on this evening’s tableau of Eleanor sewing and Julius and Nathaniel playing cards with the little girls, Grace could hear him intoning ‘I sprang to the stirrup’. He always snatched up the invisible bridle and bared his teeth like a brigand.

There was no Jake tonight, of course. They felt his absence. With her new empathy Grace knew that Clio, hunched over a book in the corner of the room, was not reading but thinking about him.

Jake’s place was taken by two of Eleanor’s convalescents. They sat near to her, talking quietly. But for this difference the well-worn room looked just as it always did, with its sagging seats and piles of books and newspapers, and the murky picture of steamers on the Rhine that always hung on the wall facing the French windows.

But Grace was possessed by the realization that everything was changing. The war had crept in here, into the Woodstock Road as well as Stretton; she had not even understood how significantly. She tasted a mixture of resentment and apprehension, dry in her mouth.

When Clio’s eyes wandered yet again from her book they met Grace’s. Even the old ground between them was changing its contours, but they were both glad of that. They needed their new friendship now.

Before dinner, Nanny came to take Alice and Tabby back up to the nursery. Nathaniel poured sherry into little cut-glass thimbles for the men, and there was general talk until it was time to go in to dinner.

Tonight, one of the housemaids had placed the evening post on a silver tray that stood on the hall table. When the family crossed the hall on the way to the dining room they saw that there were two thin blue foreign envelopes lying side by side.

Eleanor moved with surprising speed. She scooped up the two letters from Jake and then, seeing the inscriptions, she held one of them out with a little involuntary sigh of disappointment.

‘One is for you, Grace.’

It was the first letter she had received in the Woodstock Road. The others had been addressed to Stretton, or Belgrave Square. She took it, feeling the harsh crackle of the envelope between her fingers. She put it straight into the pocket of her skirt, without looking at it. She felt that the Hirshes were watching her, as if she had taken something that was rightfully theirs.

‘Shall we go in?’ Nathaniel murmured at last.

Eleanor opened her letter and had read it before the maid placed the soup tureen on the table in front of her. She looked up from the single flimsy sheet of paper.

‘He’s well,’ she said. ‘There is – there was when he was writing, rather – a kind of lull. He calls it the calm before the next storm.’

There were tears plainly visible in Eleanor’s eyes, but no one was careless enough to see them. She refolded the letter and handed it down the table to Nathaniel, and then began briskly ladling soup.

Captain Smith, one of the convalescents, said, ‘I admire what your son is doing, Professor. I was in one of those hospitals before they sent me back home. They do a fine job.’

He wanted them to know he understood Jake’s beliefs, wanted them to be aware that he didn’t consider him a shirker. It was not the Captain’s fault that he sounded like Hugo. Grace’s eyes met Clio’s again.

Nathaniel lifted his head. ‘Of course,’ he said.

The letter passed to Julius, and then to Clio. They were greedy for the news, there was no question of politely waiting until dinner was over.

Grace felt the generosity of it when Clio passed the blue paper to her in her turn. She was aware of the second letter burning in her pocket.

Jake wrote of the work he was doing, but only as numbers, how many casualties arriving, how many hours on duty, how few hours sleep. The rest of the letter was taken up with his thoughts on John Donne, whose poems he had been reading, and with reminiscences of home. He recalled the day of the picnic beside the river.

Grace gave the letter back to Eleanor. ‘Jake will be a good doctor,’ she said to fill the silence, but the random remark struck a chord of optimism. It looked ahead to a better time, beyond the necessity of survival. Eleanor’s face softened.

‘I believe so,’ she said.

The maid came to clear away their soup plates.

After dinner, it was usual for Grace to sit with Clio and Julius while they read or worked, but tonight she left the table and went quickly up through the odd layers of the house to the room she shared with Clio. She half sat and half leant against her high bed, and opened the envelope.

The letter was longer. There were three sheets of the flimsy paper, each one closely covered with Jake’s black handwriting. Grace bent her head, and began to read.

The words burned off the page. There were no careful sentences here, nothing like the letter he had addressed to Nathaniel and Eleanor. Jake had simply written what he felt, disjointed snatches of it, letting the raw suffering lie where it spilt. It was these images that had informed his earlier letters, the awkward and troubling missives that she had not wanted to look at again, but Jake had kept them veiled, somehow, saving her eyes. Now he had passed some last point of endurance, and Grace saw clearly what Jake was seeing.

Oh, Grace, the horror of it. Grace, do you hear me? I hold on to your name, like a clean white river pebble in my fingers.

They come in all day and all night, stretchers, cargoes of what were once men, pulp and jelly of flesh, turned black, bones like splinters.

Crying and screaming and praying, or lying mute like children.

I am afraid of each day, each death.

We are close to the lines here, I can hear the guns.

We run like ants, doctors and orderlies and bearers, like ants over the blood heaps, but we can do so little. Death keeps coming, the tide of it. Some of the men I work with indemnify themselves with a kind of terrible laughter, but I can’t laugh, Grace. All I can see and hear and smell is the suffering. Each separate pain, loss, life gone or broken.

The deaths are all different. We have to leave them, most of them, to the chaplains or themselves. There was a boy like Hugo, younger, who screamed and cursed. His anger poured out of him as fast as blood. As hot. And another man, an old Cockney, wept for his mother. Like a baby cries, like Alice.

I have tried to read. I know there is beauty and order somewhere, but I can’t recall it. I look at the words on the page, and I see death. I try to see your face, Clio’s face, my mother’s.

I am afraid of death, I am afraid of life like this, I am afraid for us all. I think of Hugo, under the guns. I think of all our deaths, yours and mine and the others; the same deaths, over and over, each of them different.

I have tried to assemble the disciplines of logic, and marshal the proofs of what human suffering has won for humanity, but I can find no logic here. There is only madness. I am afraid that I am mad.

Grace, you should not have to hear this. Forgive me.

I think of you, and of home. Julius and Clio. Of you, especially.

All this will end, it must end. But when it is done, whatever the outcome, nothing can be the same as it once was. I am sad for what we have lost, for what we are losing every day.

Grace lifted her head, but she didn’t see the room with its two white beds and her own gilt-backed hairbrushes laid out beside Clio’s on the dressing table. She could only see Jake, and after a moment she looked down again at the last page.

The black handwriting had deteriorated so much that she could only just decipher the words. Jake was writing about Donne again, but not in the detached, analytical way he had done in Eleanor’s letter. As far as Grace could understand, he had taken some of the poems as speaking directly to him. They had taken on a significance for him that she could only guess at.

There is one, ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, do you know it? It is about loss and grief. There is one couplet: ‘He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.’

It runs in my head, all the time, while I am doing my antlike scurrying. We are all re-begot as nothingness by this war. The evil of it, the waste.

I have to go now. We live in a canvas shelter, and I sit on my camp bed to write this on my lap by candlelight. Perhaps you can’t even read the words. Perhaps I should not send them to you, but I need to reach out. It is another weakness. I am afraid of my own cowardice, too.

You are so clean and white, Grace, like nothing here.

When will it all end?

For some reason Jake had signed not his name but his initials. It made Grace think again of the schoolroom at Stretton, of their old secure and undervalued world.

She said aloud, ‘You are not a coward.’

The window opposite her had been left wide open after the warmth of the day, but the night air was icy now. It rolled in like a hill mist and Grace shivered as it touched her bare shoulders.

She did not move, or fold the letter into its creases again. She knew that she would never forget the way Jake spoke to her out of it.

It was the letter’s fusion of two voices that touched her most profoundly. There was the old Jake, who had whispered their secrets to her in the hot summer before the war began, and from whom she had in the end retreated. Out of fear of the unknown, out of childish impatience. And there was the Jake she did not know, who had witnessed the field hospital. The images of it came to her now, in Jake’s disconnected words, pulp and jelly of flesh, bones like splinters …

And just as Jake had become two Jakes, boy and man, so the world had split into two worlds, old and new. Not only for herself, Grace understood that, but for all of them.

Images of the old world were all around her. There was this room with its mundane evidences of their girlhood, and in the framed snapshots on Clio’s tallboy there were memories of Christmases, holiday games at Stretton, beach cricket in Norfolk or Normandy.

The new world was obliterating everything that had once been familiar. Jake and Hugo in France were part of the fearsome new world, and the officers who came to mend themselves in this house, and so were the newspapers with their black headlines and their casualty lists, and even the women who served behind shop counters where there had once been men were part of it too.

For a long time, for almost two years Grace realized, she had thought of the war as a momentous event that touched them all, but as an episode that would eventually be over, leaving the world to continue as before.

It was on that day in October 1916, the day of Jake’s letter, that she understood there could be no going on as before.

If Hugo came home again, he would not be the same boy who had marched off in his fresh uniform. Jake would not be the boy who had kissed her in the angle of the hawthorn hedge. For all of them, whatever they had done, there would always be the speculation: If there had been no war. If part of a generation had not been lost.

Grace read the last, scrawled page of the letter once more.

I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

But then she put the pages aside. The blackness of the lines stirred an opposing determination in her. Grace found herself making a bargain with a Providence she had never troubled to address before.

Let them come home, she bartered, and we will make something new out of ‘things which are not’. We don’t cease to exist, those of us who are left. We’ll make another world.

She could not have said what world, or how, but she felt the power of her own determination as a partial salve.

Behind her, the bedroom door creaked open and Clio slipped into the room.

‘Grace? It’s so cold in here.’ She went to the window, closed it, and drew the curtains over the square of darkness. She did not ask, but Grace picked up the pages of the letter and gave them to her.

‘Read it,’ she said in a low voice.

Afterwards Clio sat down beside Grace on the edge of the high bed. She was ashamed that amidst all her love for Jake, and fear for him, there was a shiver of jealousy that he should have written in such a way to Grace, not to herself, or Julius. And yet she understood that in the terrible hospital Jake needed to reach out to his ideal of whiteness and cleanliness, his smooth river pebble. That was not a family entity, and so Jake turned to what was closest to home, to Grace. So she told herself.

The two girls let their heads rest together, the smooth roll of hair and the thick plait the same colour and texture, side by side. They were still sitting in the same position when Julius found them. He took his place next to Grace, making the same arrangement as on the garden bench.

He still felt happy, remembering that he had kissed her.

The letter did not surprise Julius, neither the horror of it nor Jake’s image of Grace. His vivid imagination had led him closer to the reality of what Jake was suffering, and he loved Grace to the point where he would have been more surprised to find that his brother did not.

It did not occur to Julius to feel jealous.

‘I wish he would come home,’ Clio said savagely.

‘He will, and Hugo,’ Grace promised. ‘Everything will start again. We’ll make it.’

When Eleanor came up, the letter was hidden in the folds of Clio’s dress. All three of them knew that it was for the magic circle alone. They felt that for even Eleanor to see it would be a betrayal.

That night, although she had not had the nightmare for years, Grace dreamt of her own death by drowning.