Читать книгу All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 9

The turret room was growing familiar. As he lay in bed the soldier had learnt the contour of it, the regular square of one side and then the hemispherical opposite bulge where the tower was grafted on to the red brick absurdity of the house.

He had looked up at the turret, blinking his sore eyes at the white winter sky, when they wheeled him into the house from the ambulance. Since he had been brought home from Cambrai he had seen nothing but the rigid lines of the hospital ward, and this apparition of a house with its crenellations and gables had made him momentarily afraid of hallucinations again. He had gripped the wooden arms of the wheelchair and found them solid, and had looked again to see that the house was solid too, an architect’s fantasy castle planted in the North Oxford street. There were bare-branched cherry trees in the front garden, and a child’s discarded wooden engine beside the path.

As they lifted him up the steps a woman had come out to greet him. She was statuesque, dressed in a plain grey afternoon dress, with her coils of dark hair put up in the pre-war fashion.

‘I am Eleanor Hirsh,’ she said, smiling at him. When she held out her hand it was as if they were being introduced in a London drawing room. After the months in the trenches and the indignities of hospital, the simple gesture was like a benediction. When he took her hand he saw that there were no rings except for a thin wedding band and a small diamond, and that the fingers looked as if they were accustomed to harder work than writing invitation cards.

‘And you are Captain Dennis.’

Peter Dennis forgot, momentarily, that he was in a wheelchair with his head bandaged and all his senses dislocated. He made a little bow from the waist that was almost courtly.

‘Welcome to my house,’ Eleanor said.

The nurses and the driver who had come with him from the hospital half pushed and half carried his chair up into the house. There was another nurse here, and Peter Dennis had a confused impression of a dark-brown hallway, many more stairs and passages, children’s faces solemnly watching him, all blurred by renewed pain as he was lifted out of the wheelchair and carried up to the turret room.

He heard that his attendants called the dark-haired woman Madam or Mrs Hirsh, but that the children’s voices rising up through the house cried ‘Mama …’

The room they put him into was blessedly quiet, and filled with the reflections of light from the pointed windows in the turret. The new nurse helped him into the high iron-framed bed and he lay back against the down pillows and closed his eyes.

Eleanor took Tabby and Alice down to the kitchen with her. ‘You mustn’t make too much noise,’ she told them. ‘Captain Dennis has been very ill, and now he will need to rest quietly.’

‘May we go and see him?’ Tabby asked. ‘I could show him my sewing.’

‘Perhaps, in a day or so.’

‘Did a German shoot him, as well?’ Alice demanded. It was her standard question.

‘Captain Dennis was very brave. He was fighting to defend what he believes in, and he was wounded. But the German soldier who fired at him was probably just as brave, and defending his own in the same way.’

It was a variation on Eleanor’s standard reply. With her own pacifist sons, her husband’s German blood and the male Strettons’ fierce jingoism to reconcile, she felt it was the best she could do.

‘Like Hugo?’

‘Yes, of course, like Hugo,’ Eleanor answered. That was safer ground. She did not object, for once, to Cook handing out iced biscuits to the little girls. They took their prizes and ran out into the garden before Eleanor could change her mind.

Eleanor instructed Cook that the driver and the nurses who had accompanied the ambulance would probably require tea before returning to the hospital. Then she saw that Mrs Doyle had already put the kettle on the hot plate of the big black range. The kettle sighed and a wisp of steam issued from the curved spout. Eleanor nodded her satisfaction, and the two women smiled at each other. Their relationship was unconventional, but Eleanor did not run a conventional household.

Mrs Doyle had been widowed in the first year of the war and had left her husband’s Oxfordshire village shortly afterwards to return to service. Before her marriage she had been employed as a parlourmaid in a great house, and had no experience in the kitchen. But Eleanor had lost a series of cooks who could not adapt to Madam’s haphazard housekeeping, and she was glad to offer the post to the capable-looking Mrs Doyle. Her instincts were correct. Mrs Doyle proved herself to be a naturally talented cook, producing the sweet cakes and pastries that Nathaniel loved as well as economical ragouts and vegetable pies, and managing to direct the shopping and weekly menus for the family whilst giving the impression that Eleanor was really in charge. Everyone ate much better food, and a new state of calm overtook the household.

The secret of their relationship was not a secret between the two women. They felt a comfortable and open respect for one another, and as the war continued they also became friends. Mrs Doyle’s dependability freed Eleanor to concentrate on her convalescent nursing work, and as the time passed the Woodstock Road house became less a rest home than a hospital extension.

By the beginning of 1918 the flow of casualties was so relentless that there were never enough hospital beds available. Eleanor and Nathaniel had begun to accept into the house men who were still seriously ill, simply because their taking a man who could be nursed at home meant that a bed was freed for another who could not.

One trained and one volunteer nurse now came to the Woodstock Road every eight hours, in shifts around the clock, but it was still Eleanor who took responsibility for the recovery of her patients. They did recover, almost all of them had done, some with a rapidity that surprised the doctors.

‘You should have been a professional nurse,’ Nathaniel proudly told his wife. ‘You have a great gift for it.’

‘Can you imagine my dear mama countenancing anything so dreary and dangerous? Permitting her daughters to do any work at all, however genteel?’ Eleanor sounded cheerful, but she was touched by a wistful sense of opportunity missed, of an unexperienced life running parallel to her own that she could only imagine, never know for sure. She consoled herself with the fact that she was doing what she could, now that it was needed, although it seemed so little.

Nathaniel had laughed and refolded his newspaper. ‘I can not imagine,’ he had said.

Eleanor and Mrs Doyle now had enough experience of both nurses and ambulance drivers to know that they needed tea, and slabs of cake as well. Mrs Doyle set out the plain white kitchen cups and cut a cherry cake into symmetrical pieces, and Eleanor welcomed Captain Dennis’s escorts into the kitchen.

‘Is he comfortably settled?’

‘The journey’s taken it out of him, all right,’ one of the nurses said. ‘But I reckon he’ll do well enough when he’s rested himself.’ There was no ‘madam’. She spoke with a brusquely businesslike air, one professional to another. Eleanor noticed it and felt a mild satisfaction. Only Mrs Doyle frowned and held up the big brown teapot as if to threaten the woman with it.

‘Won’t you sit down, if you have time?’ Eleanor invited.

They settled themselves around the scrubbed table, and Eleanor sat down with them. She took a cup of tea from Mrs Doyle and paid her a joking compliment about the even distribution of the cherries in the sponge. Only the driver stared and looked uncomfortable, but he was the only one who had never been to the Woodstock Road before.

The nurses talked about patients and their prospects. Eleanor stayed just long enough to drink her tea, and then she said a smiling goodbye and went off upstairs to see if her newest patient was comfortable.

‘She’s the lady of the house, is she?’ the driver sniffed. ‘Funny sort of a set-up you’ve got here, the mistress sitting drinking tea with our sort, isn’t it?’

‘More of a lady than you’re ever likely to encounter,’ the cook snapped. ‘And a finer household, too.’

The man appeared not to have heard her. He rubbed his whiskers with the palm of his hand. ‘It’s the war, isn’t it? Changing everything, all the old ways.’ He shook his head lugubriously, ready to insist that no change he had ever experienced had ever been for the better.

Nathaniel came out of the Examination Schools and began to walk up the honey-walled curve of the High. He had been lecturing on Old French vowel-shifts and his mind was still busy with the fascinating labyrinths of word-formations and Germanic borrowings. It was the middle of the afternoon and Oxford was at its busiest, but Nathaniel was oblivious to the cyclists who swept past with their gowns fluttering, the tradesmen’s vans and carts and omnibuses and private cars that clogged the road, and even the fellow dons who passed in the opposite direction and glanced at him in the expectation of a greeting. He had forgotten to button up his overcoat and it flapped around his legs as he walked, but Nathaniel didn’t notice the cold wind either.

If he had stopped to look around him it would have been to notice, with the same sadness even though it was for the thousandth time, that the faces of the undergraduates who swept by him were either too young, no more than boys, or else they were much older, and shadowed with experience. There were only one or two young men of the right age, and they were in khaki uniforms.

Still preoccupied with his own thoughts, Nathaniel passed the golden front of Queen’s and hurried on, intending to cross Radcliffe Square in the direction of the Bodleian. But when he reached the corner of Catte Street he had to wait to allow a brewer’s dray to pass ahead of him, and while he stood hesitating something made him look sideways, across the High.

Through the traffic he saw two young women. They were balanced on the edge of the kerb, one of them leaning on a bicycle, the other carrying a shopping basket. They were laughing, their heads held close together, and their rosy faces were bright with happiness. They looked very alike.

His first response was abstract admiration. An instant later he thought of Eleanor and Blanche, with their lifelong conspiracy of friendship. These two reminded him of the older twins. And only then, emerging from his preoccupation, did he see that the two were not strangers at all, but Clio and Grace.

He realized with a little shock that they were grown up, not children any longer. And as soon as the pair of faces dissolved into familiarity he lost the sense of how similar they were.

Clio was wearing her school coat and a dark felt hat with a coloured ribbon, and her schoolbag was fastened to the front of her bicycle handlebars. Eleanor allowed her to cycle to school now, because Clio insisted that all the other girls did. By contrast, Grace wore one of the well-tailored suits that Blanche’s dressmaker made for her. From somewhere, probably her mother’s wardrobe, she had purloined a fur tippet and cut it up to make a turban. The fur made a dark cloud around her face. The shopping basket was an incongruous accessory. It looked very heavy.

Nathaniel changed course and ducked through the passing traffic to greet them. They swung round at once with pleased cries of ‘Pappy!’ and ‘Uncle Nathaniel!’

‘What’s the joke about?’ he asked, wanting instinctively to be a part of it. The girls looked blankly at him.

‘I don’t think there was a joke, really,’ Grace answered. ‘We were just laughing. I’ve been to the Lending Library. Look.’ The basket was full of books. It was one of Grace’s responsibilities to select novels for the patients. She chose out of the depths of her ignorance, with results that varied from inspired to comical.

Nathaniel tilted his head to one side to read the titles on the spines. ‘Martin Chuzzlewit, mmm, mmm, Zuleika Dobson. That’s interesting. All very suitable. And where are the two of you going now?’

‘Home. Unless we can come with you? Out to tea?’

Nathaniel had been planning to do some work in his rooms, but the idea of tea was tempting.

Clio begged, ‘Please, pappy? Tea at Tripps’? You know it’s meatless day today. That means vegetable sausage for dinner, doesn’t it?’

The Hirsh household always obeyed the government’s edict for helping with food shortages by doing without meat on at least two days a week. But even Mrs Doyle’s version of the invariable vegetable sausage was no great favourite.

‘Tripps’ it is,’ Nathaniel said briskly.

The tea-shop on the corner of the Broad was an old favourite. Nathaniel had first taken Eleanor there long ago, before Jake was born. The crooked floors of the little rooms and the dark oak furniture and faded yellowish walls seemed exactly as they had always been; the difference was that the cakes were brought by waitresses in caps and aprons, whereas there had once been waiters like family retainers in dark jackets with white napkins folded over their arms.

Tripps’ appeared to be unaffected by food shortages. There were still tiny sandwiches cut into triangles and circlets, and chocolate roulade and ginger sponge and almond slices. Ceylon or China tea came in big silver-plated pots.

‘Heaven,’ Clio said greedily.

Nathaniel had been eating and looking around the room. The tables were occupied by groups of pink-faced boys, by mature men, usually alone and absorbed in a book, and by young ladies from the women’s halls, always in pairs.

Clio and Grace looked quite old enough to be one of those pairs, he thought, and then remembered that it was only another year or so before Clio would embark on her degree course. He was proud of her. When he finished his inspection of the room and looked back at their two faces he felt proud of both of them, the way they reflected each other, like two bright coins. He felt the same pleasure in their company as he had always done with Eleanor and Blanche. He was glad that the two of them seemed to have become such good friends. He would not have cared to place a bet on it when they were younger.

‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Grace invited.

‘I was thinking,’ Nathaniel teased, ‘that the two of you are almost as beautiful as your mothers.’

He was amused to see that they were both still young enough to look disbelieving, and then to blush fetchingly. Grace put her hands up to her hat, adjusting the fur cloud around her face. There was no echoing gesture from Clio in her old school felt.

‘Only almost?’

Grace had recovered herself. There was something so provocative in the curve of her mouth that Nathaniel was confused now by the dissimilarity between the two of them. Clio was still a little girl, Grace was not.

He was pleased that Jake and Julius had gone on, out of the family circle. And Julius had survived his period of Grace-enchantment admirably well, Nathaniel thought. His music studies would give him enough to think about from now on. ‘As yet,’ Nathaniel answered.

They had finished their tea. Nathaniel began to look forward to reaching home. He wanted to see Eleanor and to play for an hour with Alice. He loved his work, but the centre of his life was his wife and children. ‘Time to go,’ he announced.

Grace and Clio might have hoped for more cake, but they knew Nathaniel better than to argue. When they stood up to leave, Nathaniel noticed how the men’s eyes followed Grace. Clio must have some proper clothes, he decided. He would talk to Eleanor about it.

The three of them came out of the tea-shop into the greenish, fading afternoon light. Clio’s bicycle was propped against the wall nearby.

‘I’ll be home first,’ she called. ‘Lovely tea, pappy.’ She swung away from them towards Cornmarket. Nathaniel took Grace’s arm, and they began to walk.

It was a long way along St Giles and up the Woodstock Road. So it happened that Clio was the first to meet Captain Dennis.

She almost collided with Eleanor negotiating the stairs from the kitchen with a tea-tray. Clio took the tray from her mother automatically and Eleanor leant to kiss her cheek.

‘Hello, my darling. Will you take it up to the turret for me? Nelly and Ida are both so busy, and Grace is at the circulating library. Then come down and have some tea yourself.’

‘We met Pappy. He took Grace and me to Tripps’.’

‘Oh, how lucky.’ Eleanor was truly envious. She would have loved to sit in the tea-shop and gossip with her husband. Clio smiled at her, understanding as much.

‘Tell him to take you. Has someone new arrived?’ She nodded down at the tray.

‘The ambulance brought him this afternoon. His name is Captain Dennis. He was shot in the head, poor boy, but they say now that he will recover completely. Isn’t that marvellous?’ Eleanor was completely happy again, contemplating the good news.

Peter had watched the light fading in the corners of the room, letting himself grow familiar with the opposite contours of square and semicircle, and then he had drifted into sleep. The soft knocking at the door woke him into momentary disorientation.

‘What is it?’ he called.

‘Clio Hirsh. I’ve brought your tea.’

‘Come in,’ he said, not much the wiser.

The door opened and he saw a dark-haired girl with wide eyes and pink cheeks. She came into the room sideways, carrying a tray of tea-things. She was not a nurse, or an orderly, although she was wearing some kind of uniform. Peter blinked, feeling the mists of confusion threatening him. A kind of convalescent home, they had told him before he left the hospital. He longed suddenly for his real home, and the sight of his mother, but they had also told him that Invernessshire was too far for him to travel yet.

The girl set the tray down and then turned shyly to look at him. Peter saw that she was perhaps three years younger than himself.

‘I expect you wish you really could go home,’ she said. It was not a particularly profound insight, but in his weakness Peter was amazed and grateful. He had an uncomfortable moment when he was afraid that he might cry. He made himself smile instead. ‘It’s a very long way.’

Clio was gazing at him. One side of his head had been shaved, and where it was not hidden by the white lint dressing she could see the new growth of hair. It was a kind of fuzz, darker than the old hair.

Apart from the red pucker of a healing scar that ran upwards from his cheekbone and under the pad of bandages, his face seemed undamaged. She wanted to look at his face, but she felt constrained by her shyness. She turned to the teatray instead, and found that her hands were shaking.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a very pretty sight.’

‘I didn’t mean … It isn’t that.’ She couldn’t say that it was nothing, because he had suffered it, but it wasn’t his wound that she had been thinking about at all. ‘What happened to you?’

‘I stuck my head above a parapet. A sniper got me. The bullet sliced a furrow through the bone. Missed my brain, more or less.’ Economical words, that was all. He wouldn’t tell her about the mud and the noise and the spectre of death, any more than he had told his father and mother when they came to see him in the Oxford hospital. That was past now, and he was alive. ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Clio Hirsh.’

She had a wonderful smile, and skin like ivory satin. Her throat was very white where it was swallowed by the collar of her severe blouse. He knew that he wanted to touch it. The strength of his inclination startled him.

Clio felt his eyes on her, and put her hand up. ‘It’s my school uniform. I have to wear it. This, and the tunic.’

She was a schoolgirl. Peter Dennis’s schooldays, only two years behind him, seemed to belong to another lifetime. ‘You look very pretty in it.’ It was an unimaginative compliment, he thought, and Clio’s smile was more of a reward than it deserved.

‘Do you know, that is the second time today I have been told I look pretty?’

Peter tried to sit upright. ‘And who is the other man?’

‘My father.’

It made her happy to see him laughing, and she laughed too.

‘Let me give you some tea,’ she said, when they had finished.

She was going to hand him the cup when she saw that he had slipped down against the pillows. She leant over instead and rearranged them for him. Then she put her arm behind his shoulders.

‘Can you sit up some more?’

She lifted the weight of him, and his head rested against her for an instant. Looking down, she saw the line where his natural hair met the fuzzy new growth. She was suddenly aware of the eggshell vulnerability of the naked skull. It was terrible to think of the bullet smashing into it, the hairsbreadth distance from the soft brain. She felt a shiver of horror travelling through her limbs. Her awareness of her own body was immediately heightened. The business of muscles and tendons and blood vessels instantly struck her as precious and miraculous, all the more so for never having been considered before.

She withdrew her arm, very carefully, aware of the infinitesimal warmth of their contact.

Peter’s head flopped back against the plump pillows. ‘I’m so damned weak.’

‘You will get strong again,’ she made herself say, with composure. She handed him the white and gold teacup. The mundane gesture was invested with importance.

There was another knock at the door, and the day nurse came in. She was a square-jawed, middle-aged woman who wore a long starched apron and a cap of starched and folded linen. She was carrying the dressings box, and a tin jug of hot water.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Hirsh. How are you, Captain Dennis? It’s time for your dressing.’

Clio knew that she was dismissed. She was disappointed, but she nodded meekly. ‘Goodbye, Captain.’

He ignored the nurse. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Will you come back tomorrow?’

Clio gave him her smile once more. ‘Of course I will.’

Only when the door had closed behind her did he lean back, ready to submit. The nurse bent over him, crackling, and began to peel the old dressing away from the weeping furrow in the side of his skull.

Nathaniel and Grace were home. Clio could hear Tabby and Alice clamouring for their father’s attention. Grace was coming swiftly up the stairs. She glanced up and saw Clio hovering at the top, as if she had a secret. ‘What is it?’ Grace called.

Clio had been thinking dazedly that here was a man, a man who was neither a brother or a cousin. She had met hardly any men except the other patients, and she knew with certainty that Peter Dennis was absolutely unlike any of those.

‘Nothing,’ Clio answered innocently.

Grace came up the stairs, and stopped on the stair level with her. ‘What’s the new patient like?’

‘Quite nice, I think.’ She went on down, with every appearance of calm, and left Grace on the landing.

It was the next afternoon, when Clio was at school, before Grace met Peter Dennis. She was making a visit to each of the patients, distributing the new books she had brought home in her basket. The turret room was the highest in the house and the last one she came to.

When she came in Peter saw her dark hair and eyes, and remembered the colour of her skin. There was a faint blur of light around her silhouette, but he knew that was a trick played by his own damaged eyesight. He smiled at her. ‘Clio? I hoped you’d come today.’

Grace saw that he moved his legs a little to one side under the white covers, in the expectation that she would sit down beside him. The intimacy of the small gesture struck her first, and then came a tide of other impressions. She saw that he was good-looking, even though his head was bandaged and partly shaven, and she felt disappointed that Clio had claimed his friendship first. She understood at once that he had eagerly mistaken her for Clio, and it was a ferment of mischief and pique and residual boredom that made her smile back and answer, ‘Of course I have come.’

As she said it she sat down on the bed, in the space his long legs had made for her. She was remembering the stories that Blanche and Eleanor used to tell of confusions at evening parties when they were girls. Her smile widened, and grew brillant.

Peter Dennis was dazzled by it.

‘It’s my job to go to the library and bring back books. You must tell me what you like to read. I’m afraid there’s only one left today.’

‘What is it?’ He had been unable to read for a long time. The print blurred and ran down the page like tears, and made pain slice through his head. But now he felt that he wanted to read again. He would have liked the volume of Tennyson that had been in his tunic pocket.

Grace held out the book. ‘It’s Zuleika Dobson.’

‘I’ve read it,’ Peter said. And then he added, ‘But I would love to read it again.’ This was Zuleika, he thought lightheadedly, sitting on his bed with a rainbow around her hair. He knew that he would happily throw himself into the river for her sake.

‘Do you know the story?’

Grace hesitated. She did not, but she had no doubt that Clio did. It would not be easy, passing herself off as her cousin. The challenge enticed her. ‘Not very well,’ she hedged.

‘Zuleika is the most beautiful girl in the world. All the young men in Oxford drown themselves in the river for love of her.’

Their eyes met.

‘How stupid of them,’ Grace said softly. ‘What a waste.’

In the moment’s silence that followed there was nothing for Peter to do but lift her hand from where it lay on the bedcover. He turned it in his own, examining the fingers, the dimples over the knuckles and the knob of bone at the wrist. It seemed extraordinary that this girl should be here, with her clean apple-scented skin and shiny hair, extraordinary that he should be here himself, in this room that smelt of lavender and fresh linen and polished oak boards. He wondered if he would wake up and find himself lying in a shell-hole, the sky over his head blackened with smoke.

He closed his eyes, then opened them again.

Grace was looking steadily at him. ‘Are you tired? Does your head hurt?’ Her voice had turned gentle.

‘No. I’m not tired.’

He lifted her hand and held the palm of it against his lips.

As if drawn by an invisible thread, Grace leant towards him. She leant closer, until her cheek rested against his head. She could feel the silky texture of his natural hair and the rougher prickle of the new growth. She rubbed her cheek, turning her head so that her mouth was against his skull, and her chest seemed to tighten and expel the breath out of her lungs in a ragged sigh.

He said, ‘Clio,’ and she was startled because she had forgotten the deception.

To exclude it once more she drew her hand back, away from his mouth, and put her own lips in its place. Peter breathed in sharply, but then when her mouth opened a little he tasted the slippery heat of her tongue. He put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her so close to him that he could feel her small breasts against his chest. He pushed his tongue between her teeth, his own mouth widening. He was thirsty, and ravenously hungry.

Grace thought, What did Clio do yesterday?

It came to her that she didn’t know her cousin nearly as well as she had thought, and then that for now she was Clio, looking out from inside her. Or controlling her from above, like a puppet. The notion was intriguing, and oddly exciting. It was more exciting than what was actually happening to her.

Grace didn’t feel frightened by Captain Dennis, not in the way that Jake had frightened her with his furtive desperation. She felt pleasantly alive, and stimulated by his kisses, without being afraid that she might not be able to control him, or understand her own response.

She knew what she felt about this. She enjoyed being kissed by the damaged hero, she liked the way that he seemed to give himself up to her, with blind concentration. She was relieved to find now the first surprise was over that she felt cool, almost detached. She reached up and stroked back his hair, away from the stark white dressing.

Had Clio done the same thing yesterday?

When Peter opened his eyes her face was momentarily shot into bright and dark fragments, prism-edged, like broken mirror-shards. He waited for the visual disturbance to subside and her features reassembled themselves. For another instant there was a complete image but it was a double one, so that he saw two of her. Then the dark heads slid together and coalesced, and she was smiling at him, soft-lipped. They were both panting a little.

‘You are really here, aren’t you?’ he asked.

For answer she held out her two hands for him to take. They were warm and quite solid. He kissed the knuckles of each one in turn.

‘I can’t believe you,’ he said delightedly. ‘You are a miracle.’

‘If I were a miracle, I wouldn’t have to go now and do the tea-trays.’ Clio would be home soon.

He was anxious immediately. ‘Will you come back again?’

‘Of course I will. When I can.’

After she had gone, Peter Dennis lay back against his pillows and slipped into an erotic reverie of the kind he had not had for two years. Love and sex had been a part of the old world, the one he had exchanged for the trenches. He was astonished to find that he could re-enter the old kingdom so easily.

And in her turn Grace might have been amused to know that Peter’s imaginings were set in an idyllic water-meadow backed by a hawthorn hedge.

When the starched nurse came in she looked sharply at her patient and then pronounced, ‘You are looking very much better, Captain Dennis.’

‘I am feeling very much better, nurse, thank you,’ Peter agreed with her.

Clio came home from school, bumping her bookbag down on the console table in the hall and sending the cards and papers piled on it whirling to the floor. ‘I’ve so much work to do. Miss Muldoon is a tyrant, a vile tyrant. I wanted to be free on Saturday, and now I shall have to plough through a thousand pages of Racine. You’re so lucky, Grace, you just don’t know.’

‘I’ll do your chores for you, if you like,’ Grace offered.

Saturday was important. It was Alice’s sixth birthday, and there would be a family party. Jake and Julius were coming home for it.

Clio’s face lightened. ‘Will you, really? If I go straight up and start on it now, I might just finish it by Friday. You are a true friend, Gracie. I’ll remember you in my will.’

Grace had been intending to confide in her. She had imagined that they would enjoy the mischief of the confusion together, playing at being one another as Eleanor and Blanche had done in the ballrooms twenty years before.

But she watched Clio unpacking her books, and said nothing. Clio could play at being Grace, of course, as easily as she could play at being Clio. There was a different, darker satisfaction in keeping the secret just for herself. Clio was preoccupied with her languages, busy and productive, while Grace had no such focus. The image of the puppeteer manipulating the strings came back to her.

There was a moment when she could have said, Something quite funny happened when I took a book in to Captain Dennis. Then the moment was gone.

‘Here I go,’ Clio sighed.

‘I’ll bring you up something to eat when I’ve done the trays.’

Clio blew her a kiss from the foot of the stairs. Grace did the extra work with an assiduity that made Nelly and Ida exchange surprised glances behind her back.

Later, when the girls were preparing for bed, Clio asked, ‘Have you met the new patient yet? Captain Dennis?’

Grace concentrated on her own reflection in the looking glass as she brushed her hair. She shook her head.

Clio was smiling, wanting to offer something, a confidence, in exchange for Grace’s earlier generosity. ‘He’s … interesting. Rather beautiful, in a way.’

‘The damaged hero, you mean? Another one.’

‘Oh, no. Not another, not at all. He is quite different.’

In the glass Grace saw that there was warm colour over Clio’s throat and cheeks, and her eyes were shining. Clio was ready to fall in love, and Grace felt the allure of responsive strings in her fingers. The temptation was too strong to resist. The chance to influence Clio’s love affair more than compensated for not having a love of her own. Grace didn’t think beyond that. For two or three days, until Alice’s birthday, she enjoyed the challenges of her complicated game.

Clio’s attention was torn between the books waiting on her desk and the turret room. For the first time in her life she experienced the thrill of neglecting what she was supposed to do and indulging in what she was not. She would wait in agony for what she judged to be the safest moment, then quietly close up her grammar and slip through the shadowy house to Peter’s door. He would look up when she came in, with a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty, and when she sat on the edge of the bed he would put his arms up around her neck and draw her down beside him.

Sometimes they would kiss; more often they would lie quite still, their mouths just touching, talking in whispers. Clio told him everything, about Jake and Julius and their childhoods, about Blanche and Eleanor and their different marriages, and Stretton and what had happened to Hugo, and about Grace.

‘Why haven’t I seen Grace yet?’ Peter asked once.

‘I think she’s piqued because I’ve claimed you for my own,’ Clio said, not pursuing the topic. She was quite happy for Grace to keep her distance.

At other times, Peter would begin to talk about the war. From the way his words came, reluctantly but inevitably, Clio understood that he could never close his mind to what he had seen and done. He tried to obliterate it, but he could not. She felt it always there, a long shadow between them.

Sometimes he would remember the men in his company, recalling their jokes and their idiosyncrasies and smiling at the memory so that he looked much younger, the boy that he must have been. Almost always, it seemed, these reminiscences ended with Peter saying, ‘He was killed, not long after that.’

‘What was it really like?’ Clio asked once, her whisper almost inaudible.

There was a silence before he answered her.

Then he said, ‘Like nothing you should ever know about.’

He turned her face between his hands, so that he could look into her eyes. It was difficult for him to focus on her face, so close to his. He could see the dark fringe of her eyelashes, the glint of reflected light in her pupils. Her breath was warm and sweet. He felt in this safe place that he was bathed in happiness, like sunshine.

‘I love you,’ he told her.

‘I love you too,’ Clio breathed.

Grace had to plan her own visits with even more care. She watched and waited, and then flitted like a shadow up the stairs and passageways that led to the turret: she had to avoid the nurses, and Eleanor on her rounds, and Nelly and Ida with their clanking hot-water jugs, and Clio herself.

The best time was the quiet middle of the afternoon, when Eleanor was resting in her bedroom and the maids had retired to sit with Cook in the kitchen. The nurses withdrew too, to what had once been the housekeeper’s parlour at the back of the house, where they could be summoned by an ancient system of brass bells if any of the patients needed them.

On the first afternoon Grace had thought of putting on one of Clio’s school tunics, but she dismissed the idea as too difficult to explain away if anyone else in the household should catch sight of her. She made do with a plain linen blouse and flannel skirt, and she plaited her hair in a long braid, like Clio’s.

‘Don’t you have to go to school? It is a weekday, isn’t it? Or have I lost count?’ Peter asked in puzzlement.

‘It’s Wednesday, all day,’ Grace laughed. ‘I’m supposed to be working at home. Preparing for examinations.’ She changed the subject quickly, not eager to be questioned too closely about which examinations.

She quickly discovered that it was easier not to talk very much at all. There were too many potential pitfalls in conversation. She stretched out beside him instead, measuring her supple length against him. And at the beginning, he was a willing participant. He was even the leader in their explorations of one another.

Peter was a virgin, technically. But there had been a girl at home, the daughter of one of the tenant farmers on his father’s estate. In the summer after he had left school, before he joined his new regiment, the girl had taken a fancy to him. He could still remember the smell of dust and saddle soap and horse sweat exuded by the blanket that they spread on the floor of the barn loft, and see the dreamy, intent expression on the girl’s face as she unbuttoned his clothes and took hold of him with her cool hand.

‘Please,’ he had begged her. ‘Please, let me.’

‘No-o,’ she whispered. ‘I darena’. What would I do wi’ a babby?’

‘I’ll be careful,’ he said in his innocence. The girl only giggled.

‘For sure you will. But I’ll not let you, whatever. Look, this is what you do. It feels just as good, I tell you.’

She had guided his hand until his fingers slipped in the silky wetness and rubbed against a hard nub of flesh. She had stretched out on the blanket then, with her skirts up around her waist, exposing her thin white legs and a patch of dark red hair. She had closed her eyes, sighing and lifting her narrow hips under his hand. It seemed to Peter that she took her pleasure and achieved satisfaction with the same uncomplicated innocence as the cats in the farmyard.

‘That’s right,’ she said afterwards. ‘Now I do it for you, see?’

She did, with quick, businesslike strokes, and he groaned when the milky jet spurted over the blanket to lie in glistening clots between their bodies.

Peter knew that it was not as good as burying himself inside her, but it was good enough. There were variations, too, they discovered together before it was time for him to leave for France.

Part of him longed to rediscover all those variations with this miraculous Clio. When she wasn’t with him he thought of it constantly. But when she did come to his room he was immediately and painfully conscious of every creak and whisper in the old house, imagining a footstep outside the door, voices intruding on them, staring eyes and shocked exclamations.

‘What’s the matter?’ Grace whispered. ‘Don’t you like it when I do this?’

‘I like it too much,’ he answered, half-ashamed.

She was much braver than he was, much more reckless. She seemed to have no fears of discovery. Her hand brushed against him, and he felt that it was hot through the thin sheet.

Peter had begun to be puzzled. He admired her, he was captivated by her in all her moods, but he was confused by her capriciousness. Sometimes when she came she was demure, even shy, seemingly happier to lie in his arms and whisper disarming confidences than to touch and tease. She said, I love you, and he believed her. And then at other times she was evasive, except in the matter of her thin, smooth body. The heat in her seemed almost febrile. He would follow her lead and then he would shiver with the fear that someone would come in and discover them.

If he told her he loved her then she would only smile, and look at him from beneath her dark eyelashes.

He felt more comfortable with her innocent, confiding manner, but it was the other one he dreamt of when he was alone.

He lay in his room and for all his satisfaction otherwise his thoughts circled around the mystery of it, as if he could not keep his tongue away from an aching tooth.

At last he said to her, when she slipped into the turret room on Friday evening. ‘Wicked Clio, today, is it?’

Clio was in her bedroom, finishing her translation. Alice was being put to bed in a state of furious over-excitement, and the rest of the household was preparing for the birthday party and the arrival of Jake and Julius. Grace had stretched out full-length on the bed beside Peter, her head propped on one hand. Unusually, her hair was loose and a strand of it lay across Peter’s shoulder.

She hesitated only for an instant. Then she looked full at him. ‘What can you mean by that?’ she asked, in her teasing voice. ‘I am never wicked.’

His eyes met hers. She saw that he was serious.

‘You know what I mean.’

Grace had sensed his confusion, almost from the moment he had become aware of it himself. She had understood that whatever it was that Clio and Peter did or talked about together, it was different from what she did. She was not finding out what it was like to be Clio, only setting herself further apart from her. She was not directing anything, and she had no power at all. She was simply involved in a mean and sordid piece of trickery.

The realization had made her feel miserable and defiant. It was worse because she had grown to like Peter Dennis, and to wish that he might like her for herself, rather than for her inept version of Clio.

She wondered now if she had said or done something obviously wrong, or omitted to do something else, and so given away her wretched secret. She had already decided that it was time to stop her visits. She would change her clothes and give herself an elaborate coiffure, and re-introduce herself as Grace. If it was not already too late.

She answered warily, ‘I don’t think I do know.’

She saw that he hadn’t guessed, but that he must do soon.

Peter sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter, then.’

Grace sat up. ‘I’d better go. Mama needs help downstairs.’

He held her wrist then, unwilling to let her go in either of her incarnations. ‘Stay.’ He wanted to force her back against the white pillows, shutting out her life that he didn’t know beyond the door of the turret room. He wanted her to belong to him, with all her inconsistencies.

A little of Grace’s confidence flooded back. She did have her own power that was nothing to do with Clio. She had learnt that from Jake and Julius.

‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ she promised. One last time, she told herself. She leant over and kissed him, and for a moment the dark veil of her hair obscured the light.

In the morning Clio said happily, ‘I’m so looking forward to you meeting my brothers.’

She had brought his breakfast tray. Instead of her school uniform she was wearing her best dress, hyacinth-blue crêpe de Chine with the faint traces of an ink stain in the front panel of the skirt. The bodice had slightly too many fussy ruches and pleats, but Peter thought she looked beautiful. He wanted to reach out for her, but the morning nurse was bustling in and out with her thermometer and hot water. They contented themselves with touching hands when her back was turned.

‘I’m looking forward to it too,’ he said.

Clio had talked a lot about her brothers. He knew that Jake had finally been invalided home from a hospital in France, suffering from pneumonia and exhaustion. He was a medical student now, at University College in London.

He knew about Julius the violinist, too. Clio talked less about her twin, but he guessed that it was because there was a closeness between the two of them that went deeper than words. He was particularly curious to meet Julius Hirsh.

While they were talking, they could hear Alice’s high-pitched voice rising excitedly through the house. Now she materialized in the open doorway and blinked at Peter. Her springy black curls had been pulled back into a tight braid, and her round face suddenly looked older.

‘I’m six,’ she said importantly. ‘My cousin Grace did my hair grown-up for me. It’s my birthday.’

‘I know it is. May I wish you many happy returns of the day?’

Alice had firm likes and dislikes, not always logically based. She included Peter amongst her likes. ‘Thank you. Did you buy me a present?’

Clio remonstrated. ‘Alice!’ but Peter held up his hand.

‘I am afraid I didn’t. It isn’t very easy for me to buy presents, lying here like this.’

‘Pappy and Mama gave me a dolls’ house. With furniture.’

‘I see. Is there a dog kennel?’

‘Of course not.’

‘All dolls’ houses need a dog to guard them, and a kennel for him to live in. I will carve you one. I happen to be a very fine wood-carver.’

Alice beamed. ‘That would be very kind of you.’

A moment later she was gone.

It delighted Clio that her love was generous to her little sister. He had told her that he had two younger sisters of his own, at home in Scotland. She liked to think of him as part of a family, belonging to a warm nexus like her own. She looked at him now, with the nurse bending over him and the asymmetrical crest of his hair spread out on the pillow, and thought that she had never felt happier in her life than she had done since Peter Dennis had come.

‘What time will your brothers be here?’

‘On the eleven o’clock train from Town. Pappy will go to the station to meet them.’

Peter heard the excitement of the arrival.

He was alone, watching the progress of the squares of sunlight across the polished floor. Then he heard the chugging of a taxicab, and running feet and excited voices. Alice’s shrill cries were the most clearly audible, but it sounded as if the entire household had spilt out of the front door and down the steps to greet the returning sons.

After the hubbub was over and the house had swallowed the voices up once more, it was a long, slow hour and more before Peter heard them coming along the passage to his room. He sat up against his pillows, watching the door.

Clio was the first to appear, with pink cheeks and bright eyes, as he had first seen her. She was followed by two tall young men who had to stoop to pass under the door lintel.

Peter’s first impression, born out of his upper-class Anglo-Scots prejudice, was that they looked large and strange and exotic, unmistakable Jewish. He had noticed none of this strangeness in Clio. The two young men were like their huge, black-bearded father, and Clio took after her aristocratic mother. But then, when they came closer to shake his hand, he saw the strength of the family likeness. It was especially marked between Clio and Julius. It was as if the addition of her brothers made him see Clio afresh, in a different context. Her duality seemed less puzzling, then.

Jake was friendly and direct. He sat on the end of the bed and talked to Peter about where he had been fighting, and about his injuries and recovery. Julius was quieter. Peter noticed that his wrists protruded from the sleeves of his coat, and that his hands were long and pale with broad, spatulate tips to the fingers. He asked if Peter played chess and diffidently offered to give him a game, later, after the birthday party.

Clio looked from one to the other of the three faces, with a mixture of pride and anxiety. It seemed very important that they should all like one another.

Eleanor called them. ‘Jacob! I need you to help to move this table. Why is poor Grace left to do all the work?’

They stood up obediently. ‘Can’t you come down and join the party?’ Julius asked.

‘Peter’s eyesight is affected, he has to keep still, the doctors won’t let …’ Clio broke off, blushing, knowing that she had betrayed her loving concern. Her brothers grinned.

‘Next time,’ Peter said, smiling at her. ‘But I would like to meet Grace. To complete the set.’ He saw, in the three faces, three different reactions to her name. Julius’s was the least ambivalent.

‘You will,’ Clio promised. ‘I’ll make her come up.’

Alice sat the head of the long table. She was wearing her best white muslin dress and a crown that Tabby had made for her out of gold paper. Tabby was always happier to celebrate other people’s birthdays than to be the focus of attention on her own. Nathaniel and Eleanor sat on her right and left hands, and down the length of the table were the Hirsh children, Julius and Jake vying with each other to make Alice laugh and encouraging her to an even higher pitch of excitement, three or four little girls who were Alice’s friends and who stared at her brothers with big, round eyes, and Oswald Harris and his wife and children. Grace sat at the far end, facing Alice.

On the white linen cloth there were the remains of jewel-coloured jellies and iced cakes, with ribbons and favours and fondant sweets. Grace watched Mrs Doyle come in with the birthday cake. It was chocolate and cream, with a ruff of the same gold paper as Alice’s crown.

Nathaniel beamed with paternal pleasure as Alice seized the bone-handled knife from Mrs Doyle. He looked across the table at his wife, celebrating in the exchanged glance another year of family life, Jake’s safe return and recovery, the quiet continuation of the domestic happiness.

‘My cake! I cut it,’ Alice shouted.

Grace thought that she could not stomach much more of this joyful family harmony. In a little while there would be singing, and then noisy party games. Just for the moment, she had had enough of Hirsh good humour and wholesome merrymaking. Birthdays and family occasions at Stretton and Belgrave Square were more sombre, restrained events. This party, today, made her feel rebellious and contrary.

She pushed her chair back, and slipped away from the table, murmuring an inaudible excuse. Only Julius saw her go.

It was pleasant to be out of the overheated room. She wandered slowly up the stairs. The upper part of the house was cool and silent. She came to the door of the turret room, and gently pushed it open.

Peter was asleep. Grace stood beside the bed, looking down at him. He was rather beautiful, she thought. He looked like a marble knight on a tomb. She had to lean down, until her face almost touched his, before she could hear the faint sigh of his breathing.

Grace smiled suddenly. She wanted to warm the cold marble and bring the effigy to life.

It was her last visit. She had no idea, still, what it was like to be Clio, and she understood that the notion was ridiculous. After this she would be Grace entirely. But for now, in this hour while Alice’s party went on downstairs, she felt that she was anonymous.

She reached up to the buttons that fastened the neck of her dress. It was her best afternoon dress, silk in tiny stripes of lavender and cream. She undid the pearl buttons, and the dress rustled down around her ankles. Grace stepped away from it, feeling the cool air on her bare arms and shoulders. She lifted the bedcovers and Peter stirred in his sleep. Grace lay down beside him, and drew the covers over them both.

Then she turned to him and put her arm around his neck. She felt that her own body was a matter of soft curves and recesses, whereas Peter’s was all bone and sharp angles. She let her breath warm his cheek, and then she reached with the tip of her tongue to the corner of his mouth.

Peter opened his eyes and looked directly into hers. She was afraid that he could see straight through into her head.

As soon as he woke up, Peter knew that it was not Clio in his bed. This girl did not look like Jake and Julius. She was rounder, fuller-lipped, more English. There was a dress lying on the floor, in shadow now but where he had watched the square of light move that morning, and it was not Clio’s hyacinth blue.

Peter was used to dreams, to apparitions that were more vivid than dreams. This one was as welcome as the others were unwelcome. He didn’t try to talk, or to define the mysterious boundary between sleeping and waking. He put his arm around her waist, and his mouth against her bare shoulder.

‘Zuleika,’ he whispered.

Outside in the Woodstock Road a car drew up. It was a dark green Bullnose Morris, driven by a young man in flying goggles and leather gauntlets. He jumped from the driver’s seat and strolled around to open the door for his passenger, another young man. The passenger put one hand on the driver’s shoulder and carefully negotiated the high step to the ground. Then he held on to the polished chrome door handle while his friend took a pair of wooden crutches from behind the seats and fitted them under his armpits.

‘Very good of you, Farmy,’ Hugo said. ‘Won’t you come in and have a drink? My aunt and uncle will be glad to see you.’

‘No, thanks all the same, Culmington. Little girls’ birthday parties are not quite my métier. Big girls’ quite different, of course. Let me just see you to the door, won’t you?’

Hugo moved quickly on his crutches. One leg of his flannel trousers, empty, was rolled up and pinned neatly just below the knee. He was already ringing the bell when Farmiloe held up a parcel.

‘Don’t forget the present. Enjoy yourself.’

Nelly opened the front door. Through the open drawing-room door beyond Hugo could see a line of cushions, and a dozen pairs of flying feet. Someone was thumping out a Strauss waltz on the piano. The games were in progress.

‘Hugo, Hugo.’

Alice saw him first. Musical bumps were abandoned as the Hirshes came flooding out into the hall.

‘Happy birthday, miss.’ Alice was a favourite of Hugo’s. He held the present above her head, so she had to jump for it.

‘Be careful, Alice,’ Eleanor scolded. ‘Hugo, this is wonderfully good of you.’

‘I’m not an invalid, Aunt Eleanor, I don’t know about good. College tea is a poor show on Saturdays. Is there anything left?’

Grace and Peter did not hear the new arrival. They only heard the rasp of one another’s breathing, and the rustle of clothes, and the small squeak of the iron bedstead.

They could not have heard Hugo asking, ‘Where’s Grace? Not in a sulk, somewhere, is she?’

But if they had been listening they would have heard the quick clicking of Eleanor’s heels as she came along the linoleum corridor. She had not been able to find Grace in the garden, nor in her bedroom, so she could not have retired with a headache. The only possibility was that she had looked in to see if any of the patients needed anything. Eleanor was thinking that it was considerate of her, with the rest of the household so busy elsewhere.

When it opened, the door seemed to admit a wedge of cold blue light into the room. Peter felt it touch him, and freeze him. Eleanor stood in the coldness of it, staring at them in silence, for what seemed an eternity.

‘Grace.’

He understood then, but only then.

‘Nemesis was swift and awful,’ Jake said afterwards. He was the only one of them who could joke about it; even much later. For Julius, it was the time when he began to understand that he was a spectator in Grace’s concerns, not a participant.

Grace was sent back to London, to Blanche, in the deepest disgrace. She spent the remainder of the year, until the war ended, yoked to a series of chaperones and fulfilling a round of charity work and visits with her mother.

She always claimed thereafter that those months were the most miserable of her life.

Peter Dennis returned to the hospital, and Nathaniel wrote a stiffly worded letter to his commanding officer. Before the ambulance came to take him away, defiant and dry-eyed Grace managed to insinuate herself into his room for the last time. She was supposed to be folding linen in a cubbyhole downstairs, but she had walked through the house with her head held up and no one had come out to intercept her.

‘I wanted to say goodbye,’ she told him. ‘Even though we haven’t been properly introduced.’

Peter stared at her in incomprehension. He could not imagine what it was that drove Grace to pretend carelessness, even comedy, when he could see that she was miserable. He was wondering how what had seemed with Clio to be innocent and natural should have become a matter for shame and public humiliation, because of Grace. He felt ashamed when he remembered what he had done with this mutinous girl, letting himself believe that she was Clio.

‘I suppose the gentlemanly course would be to ask you to marry me.’ He thought sentimentally of marrying Clio, the impossible outcome.

Grace gave a harsh spurt of laughter. ‘I’m not ready to marry anyone yet. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t feel that you should apologize.’

Grace didn’t seem to flinch. She held out her hand. ‘Won’t you say goodbye?’

There was something determined about her, a toughness that he disliked but could not deny. At last he held out his hand in return. Grace shook it, and then turned without another word and went back to folding the linen, waiting for her father’s chauffeur to come and take her away.

In the hours before the ambulance arrived Peter waited and wished, but Clio didn’t come.

It was Clio who suffered most. She could not bring herself to go up to the turret room again, imagining Grace there. She didn’t want to see her brothers’ sympathetic, speculative expressions, or her mother’s anxiety, or Nathaniel’s disappointment. She wanted to be with Peter as they had been before Alice’s birthday party, and that possibility was gone for ever. She sat in her bedroom, listening to the timid sounds of the shocked household, until Grace came.

No one overheard what passed between Clio and Grace before the chauffeur came, and neither of them ever talked of it afterwards.

It was Clio’s anger that made Grace realize the final absurdity of having tried to imitate her. She had expected tears or temper, but nothing like the bitter fury that Clio turned on her. For all their seventeen years together, she had never properly known her cousin.

‘You have to have everything, don’t you?’ Clio had whispered. Her eyes were like black holes in her white face. ‘You have to take everything for yourself. You don’t really want it, because you don’t know what you want, but you can’t bear anything to belong to someone else.

‘That was how it was with Jake and Julius, wasn’t it? Not loving them for themselves, but just demonstrating that you could have them, mesmerize them.’

Grace tried to laugh. ‘I’m not a hypnotist.’ But Clio’s cold face froze her.

‘No. You’re a liar, a deceiver. And you saw what I felt about Peter, so you had to wreck it, didn’t you?’

‘Clio, that’s not true. He mistook me for you. I thought it would be like Blanche and Eleanor, when they were girls. It was a way of being closer to you …’

There was too little time, and Grace knew at once that the hasty elision of what she had really felt was the wrong explanation.

Clio spat at her. ‘You are not close to me. I hate you, Grace. I want to kill you.’

Grace faltered. ‘No, you don’t. I did something stupid and thoughtless, and I regret it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

Clio shook her head. The anger inside her seemed to expand, stretching taut the skin of her face, tightening her scalp over her skull. The blood throbbed behind her eyes, and she wanted to reach out her fingers to Grace’s throat, to squeeze the soft, startled smile off her face.

In a small smothered voice she said, ‘After all this time. After living here, with us. I hate you. I could easily kill you.’

Grace’s own anger rose up in response. ‘Living here? With you complacent, condescending Hirshes? Who are you, after all? What do you know?’

‘Go away, Grace. Go away now, before I hit you.’ Clio ran across the room, and flung the door open. Ida the housemaid’s frightened face was revealed on the other side, her hand raised to knock.

‘The car is here, Lady Grace,’ Ida mumbled.

From her window, Clio watched Grace’s boxes being stowed in the dicky. She didn’t move until Grace had taken her seat, stiff-backed, until the chauffeur had closed the door on her and swung his starting handle, until the car had rolled away and out of sight down the length of the Woodstock Road.

Two hours later, from the same place, she saw Peter’s wheelchair rolled up the ramp into the high-sided ambulance. She didn’t know where they were taking him.

Six weeks later, a small parcel came addressed to Alice. Inside it was a tiny carved dog kennel, and a miniature china cocker spaniel. A single line on an otherwise blank sheet of paper wished Alice a belated happy birthday. There was no address.

After some thought, Eleanor and Nathaniel allowed Alice to keep her present.

No letter came for Clio. She would have written to him if she could, she wrote a thousand letters in her head, but she never put one down on paper. She knew that Captain Dennis would rather forget what had happened in the turret room.