All My Sins Remembered

by Rosie Thomas

  There was a short line of taxicabs and chauffeured private cars outside the house. Julius caught a glimpse of Hugo limping up the steps with his friend Farmiloe, and an ancient Earley aunt moving like a tortoise in their wake. Her Victorian tiara was slightly askew on her thin white hair. He marshalled his own trio of guests with a sense of duty rather than anticipation.

  Armstrong was his friend, a thin, studious and very young man with a weak chest, but he didn’t know the other two particularly well. Vaughan was much older, wore a black moustache, and had a mysterious private life. Zuckerman was a talented flautist. He had a rich father and an enigmatic expression heightened by spectacles so thick-lensed they were almost opaque. Julius had invited the three of them to his sister’s dance because Eleanor had begged him to.

  ‘It will be a disaster,’ she had sighed. ‘There are no young men, none at all. Whom will the girls dance with?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is it important?’ It seemed to Julius that a shortage of dancing partners for Clio and Grace was hardly the most serious consequence of the war.

  ‘Of course it is important. When your Aunt Blanche and I came out we danced with everyone, even the old Prince of Wales.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Julius had heard the story enough times.

  ‘Then be a lamb, and ask some of your student friends, won’t you? You must know lots of nice young men.’

  He had done his best, but the forlorn group in Belgrave Square now seemed hardly adequate. Zuckerman had pulled a silver flask out of his pocket and swallowed a long gulp. He winked at Julius as he screwed the cap on again. ‘Over the top and into the fray, then.’

  Blanche’s butler opened the door to them. ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he muttered with the utmost gloom. Julius gave a silent prayer of thanks that he had resisted all Blanche’s invitations to bring his friends to the family dinner before the dance, and let himself be carried forward into the ball.

  As soon as they entered the ballroom Julius hesitated in the doorway and quartered the room with his eyes. He always looked for Grace first. Only then, when he had caught a brief glimpse of her, could he turn his attention to other people.

  Tonight, peering through the crowd, he could only see men with red faces, dowdy chaperones, and girls in white dresses anxious with their dance cards, none of them Grace. The room was already hot, and the dancing had only just begun. Julius could feel Zuckerman and Vaughan crowding up behind him. Armstrong stood to one side, hooking his index finger down inside his stiff collar, a sure sign that he was nervous and uncomfortable. Julius couldn’t see Grace anywhere.

  ‘Come and meet my mother and my aunt,’ Julius said, reluctantly abandoning his search. The music students trooped after him.

  Eleanor and Blanche were receiving their guests in front of the vast rust-coloured marble chimneypiece that dominated the room. Nathaniel on one side of them looked hot and rumpled, with his beard spreading over his white tie, while John Leominster on the other made an almost comical contrast in his stiffly immaculate evening clothes.

  Their wives looked as alike as the men were different. Although they both had fine threads of silver in their dark hair, and their figures were now unfashionably full, they still looked the Victorian belles that Sargent had painted. Blanche was in sea-green with the Stretton diamonds glittering on her bosom and in her hair. Eleanor wore dark blue shot silk, with the more modest jewels left to her by her mother the previous year. The dance for Clio and Grace was the first big family celebration to be held since Lady Holborough’s death.

  As Julius kissed them in turn he saw that Eleanor and Blanche both had the same eager, faintly anxious expression. It made them look even more the reflection of one another. He breathed in their old-fashioned flowery scents, white lilac and stephanotis.

  ‘Aunt Blanche, may I introduce my friends from the College?’

  ‘Thank you, my darling,’ Eleanor whispered while the others shook hands with Nathaniel and John. ‘Such nice-looking boys. Won’t you take them now to meet Clio and Grace? I was so afraid that there would be no young men. But now I think it will be all right.’ Her anxious expression lightened a little.

  ‘Of course it will be all right.’ Julius smiled at her. He saw Clio, standing to one side of John Leominster. Her rolled-up hair showed her white neck, and the bodice of her dress revealed the childish knobs of bone at the base of her throat. Her head was bent, and she was reading the little tasselled booklet in which she wrote her partners’ names as if it interested her.

  ‘Clio, may I introduce my friend Victor Zuckerman?’

  It was then that an avenue opened through the dancers and he saw Grace. She was waltzing with a man he didn’t know. Her head was back, and she was laughing. The wide skirts of her balldress made white waves over the polished floor. There were white flowers in her hair.

  Clio was thinking that it was a shame that so much hope and effort and anticipation should have been put into planning an evening that was so dull. She was aware of the apparent ingratitude of the thought; but then she decided that she was not being ungrateful, simply realistic.

  A good deal of money had been spent. Uncle John Leominster probably had the money to spare, although he counted every penny that his wife was spending on Grace’s Season. Clio knew that her own father didn’t even really have the money, and wouldn’t have been able to give her a season at all if Grandmother Hirsh had not helped him. And then, once he had consented to Clio’s coming out in the year before beginning to study for her degree, he had been generous to the limit of his means. It was Nathaniel who had insisted that Clio must have three balldresses, and new teagowns and suits and a visit to Blanche’s London coiffeuse, just like Grace. Nathaniel’s view was that if the job was to be done at all, it must be done properly.

  Clio felt a rush of love for her father. It was only a pity, she reflected, that his determination that she should be fairly treated and the collaboration between the two families should have resulted in the choice of the same band, the same food, the same flowers and apparently the same guests as at every other girl’s dance. The only difference, as she surveyed the room, seemed to be that here the faces were redder, the band more lacklustre, the air more stifling and the yawns behind the white gloves less well concealed than at any of the other dances she had been to.

  There had been a number of other dances. The first Season after the war was well under way, with a determination from everyone concerned that it should be as glittering as any Season had ever been. There had been tea-parties too, and ladies’ luncheons, and Clio had dutifully met and talked to the other girls of her year, and their mothers, and their surviving male relatives, and had invited the same girls under their mothers’ chaperonage to meet her own brothers and cousins this evening.

  There were far too many ancient Stretton and Earley and Holborough uncles, gallantly but creakily waltzing, and a severe shortage of the handsome young men that even Clio had allowed herself to dream of at her coming-out dance. In fact if it were not for some medical student friends of Jake’s, some boisterous Oxford men that Hugo had brought, and the odd-looking trio that had just appeared in Julius’s wake, there would be almost no young men at all.

  Clio missed Peter Dennis, as she had missed him every day for more than a year.

  She missed other things too: the calm routine of Oxford, her books and the garden, and the conversation of rational human beings. She thought she had never met so many empty-headed and snobbish people as she had done in the last month, nor wasted so much time in changing her clothes, eating food she did not want, and exchanging pointless small talk with girls she did not wish to talk seriously to.

  Clio was priggishly dismissing her season as a frivolous nonsense. She was only enduring it because it pleased her mother to see her, and because what pleased Eleanor also pleased Nathaniel. She would have been reluctant to admit to her dreams of meeting an interesting man. Clio was sure that she was still in love with Captain Dennis.

  Victor Zucker
man was asking her to dance.

  ‘Thank you,’ Clio said meekly, and let him take her hand.

  ‘Jolly good band,’ Victor tried, not quite managing a convincing imitation of Hugo or one of his friends. He smelt strongly of whisky. Clio looked at him, trying to gauge his expression behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. His hand felt burningly hot in the small of her back. But at least he danced in time to the music. He might not trample on the toes of her satin slippers.

  ‘Do you think so? It is the third time I’ve heard them this week. Familiarity must be breeding contempt.’

  Over Mr Zuckerman’s shoulder she saw Grace’s partner leading her back to her place. Grace was still laughing, with her head close to his. Grace would always find something to enjoy, however dismal and predictable the occasion, Clio knew that. And yet she had been sent to finishing school in Switzerland as soon as the war ended. She had made new friends, travelled to Italy, had her horizons enviably broadened. Clio could not understand her pleasure in this boring ritual.

  ‘That’s a jolly pretty dress,’ Mr Zuckerman offered.

  ‘Thank you.’ Clio couldn’t help smiling at him, he was trying so hard. Her dress had been made by Eleanor’s Oxford dressmaker. It was paper-white taffeta, with a tendency to collapse into concave panels instead of standing out in a stiff bell. The same dressmaker had made her two other ballgowns, one shell-pink and one powder-blue with darker blue bows. Clio had wanted rippling gold satin and ink-blue velvet, but Eleanor had insisted that neither was suitable.

  Grace had been taken to Reville & Rossiter for her ballgowns. The London couture house was not quite Paris, of course, but it was good enough. Her dress tonight was oyster-white silk, tight-bodiced and pannier-skirted, with a hooped overskirt of the finest white net that made her look as if she was dancing in a halo of light. It was a romantic denial of all the sensible plain tunics of the war years.

  Clio looked away from where Grace was being led back into the dancing by a different partner. She tried to ignore the bitterness that she felt, telling herself that she should rise loftily above it. But it was difficult not to be aware of the gulf between the two of them, just because the whole evening seemed to emphasize it.

  The dance itself was being held in the Strettons’ house, whereas Clio and her family had travelled up from the increasingly battered and down-at-heel household in the Woodstock Road. Even the stiff engraved invitations declared the difference between Lady Grace Stretton and Miss Clio Hirsh.

  Clio was not ashamed of her Jewish name. She was fiercely proud of her father and his academic reputation. But she was sensitive enough to have noticed in the past weeks that other people spoke her name in a certain way, looked at her in another certain way, with a flicker of speculation. ‘The father is Jewish, of course,’ she had once overheard one matron whisper to another.

  Clio frowned, anger stiffening her spine a little. She looked across to where Dora Hirsh was sitting on a gilt chair. Levi Hirsh was dead, but Nathaniel’s mother was alert and straight-backed, a tiny figure in a shiny black dress with her black and gold net purse clasped on her lap. It was Dora’s money, mostly, that was paying for the band and the wilting flowers, and the bland chicken and dryish trifle that they would be eating later. Clio tried to convey love and pride and solidarity across the room to her grandmother. She was glad to see that Jake was sitting beside Dora on another gilt chair, volubly talking.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Victor Zuckerman asked. He must have felt Clio’s stiffness. ‘Didn’t tread on you, did I?’

  It came to Clio that her partner was almost certainly Jewish too. She smiled at him with real warmth. ‘Of course not. You’re a good dancer.’

  Victor beamed. He had just noticed that Hirsh’s rather prim and silent sister was extremely pretty when she smiled. Instinctively he held her closer, letting himself imagine her legs under the swathes of taffeta.

  The room grew hotter. Clio danced with Jake, and then with one of the medical students who told her he was her brother’s dissection partner. They shared a cadaver between them, he said proudly. Clio thought she could detect a faint smell of formalin clinging about him, reminding her of the Pitt-Rivers.

  The more elderly relatives were beginning to make their way to the supper-tables in the library when Blanche tapped Clio on the arm. ‘I don’t think you have met Mr Brock, Clio, have you? His mother was a cousin of your mother’s and mine on the Earley side.’

  It was the man Grace had been laughing with. Clio saw that his evening clothes and his fairish hair were as conventionally cut as John Leominster’s, but his long, humorous face and a gap between his front teeth made him look immediately interesting, even rakish.

  ‘Anthony Brock,’ he said, taking her hand. Blanche had already moved away, having done her duty with yet another introduction. Clio had a momentary impression of a sea of polite pink faces, drifting away from her into oblivion, before she focused on Anthony’s.

  ‘I saw you dancing with my cousin Grace,’ she said, and, before she could stop herself, ‘What were you both laughing at so much?’

  Anthony grinned. His well-dressed-brigand look intensified. ‘Ah, about the rituals and rigours of doing the Season. About all this, I suppose.’

  One small movement of his forefinger took in the crowd, and everything that had seemed dismal about it to Clio at once became less depressing.

  ‘I was going to ask if I might have the honour of escorting you into supper?’

  No one else had asked her. She answered with the same ironic formality. ‘With pleasure.’

  The supper room was only half full, and it looked pretty with shaded candles on the little round tables. Clio’s spirits lifted further. Anthony Brock brought her a plate of the inevitable sauced chicken, and poured hock into her glass. Clio learnt that he worked in the City, in his father’s stockbroking company, but had ambitions to enter Parliament. He had fought in France, but it wasn’t until later that she heard from elsewhere that he had been awarded the MC.

  ‘And you?’ he asked.

  Clio blushed. ‘I’m going up to Oxford. Modern languages.’

  ‘Are you, now?’ Anthony drank his wine reflectively. ‘You look very like your cousin,’ he told her.

  ‘I know.’ She was aware that he was studying her face. His head was a little on one side, as if he were making some decision. He put his glass down on the white cloth, matching up the foot to the faint circle left by its own weight. Then he said softly, ‘I told Grace that I was going to marry her. I don’t think she believed me.’

  Clio felt her small, presumptuous glow of happiness dwindle and fade. Nothing changed, the half-eaten chicken on her plate retained the same consistency and the candles under their shades threw the same soft light, but the supper room was ordinary again, and the faces around them once more in focus, pink and solid.

  She lifted her head. She was glad that he was so direct. It was a relief not to have been left to cherish an illusion, a pointless illusion.

  ‘I don’t suppose she disbelieved the intention. It isn’t quite unique.’ Clio couldn’t keep all the sharpness out of her voice. It was true, in any case. Grace had accumulated several admirers and more than one proposal in the course of the Season. Clio herself had had her share, although she couldn’t imagine herself accepting any one of the offers. She thought they were oddly flippant. There was a desperation under the gaiety of it all that made her think that the men who had survived wanted nothing more than to turn their backs on what they had experienced, with any woman, the first to hand.

  She hadn’t talked about this to Grace, although she wondered if she felt the same. For all their present enforced intimacy, the two of them spoke only in superficialities. They were still wary, after their year’s separation.

  She went on, trying to sound kind. ‘It’s just that I don’t think Grace wants to marry anyone at all. Not yet.’

  Anthony was perfectly composed. ‘I can wait,’ he said. ‘But I will marry her, in the end.�
��

  Clio laughed then in spite of herself, liking him, and at the same time remembering how she had seen Grace laughing too. ‘I shall enjoy watching the chase. I wish you the best of luck.’ She meant the good wishes and Anthony saw that she did. He put out his hand again.

  ‘Shall we be friends?’ he asked her.

  ‘By all means,’ Clio said, shaking it. And so Anthony Brock became her friend as she became his ally in the pursuit of Grace.

  The evening was far from over. There were more introductions and more small talk, and yet more dances contracted for, entered on the card, and limply undertaken. Clio took her turn with the swarthy Mr Vaughan, the chronically nervous Mr Armstrong, her brothers, and Hugo’s friend Farmiloe. Hugo could not dance, but he was not short of company on his sofa to one side of the hideous chimney-piece. Hugo represented a catch, of course, and all the mothers were interested in him. Even Clio understood and accepted as much, even though it was plain that her own brothers were far cleverer and more handsome than the Viscount.

  At last, when it seemed that there was not another lungful of air left in the ballroom, the trickle of girls and chaperones making their thanks to Blanche and Eleanor became a steady stream. Eleanor was leaning on Nathaniel’s arm, with Blanche on his other side. John was in the card room, where most of the remaining men had retired to play bridge and smoke cigars. The sisters were weary but satisfied. They had achieved an evening neither more nor less remarkable than a hundred others. Their daughters had looked prettier than most of their competitors, they had danced every dance, and all the requirements of the occasion had been met.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself, darling?’ Eleanor asked Clio when they found themselves looking at an empty floor littered with the bruised petals from corsages and tassels dropped from dance cards.

  ‘It was wonderful, thank you,’ Clio said dutifully. ‘I’ll always remember it.’

  Grace had been patting a cloud of net into place around her white shoulders, but now she lifted her head and caught Clio’s eye. Her expression was one of such wicked mockery and humour and conspiracy that Clio had to look away quickly to suppress a snort of laughter. It came to her that Grace was her partner in all of this, her fellow and contemporary. Eleanor and Blanche, even Nathaniel, belonged to a remote generation. They are Victorians, Clio thought. She found herself wishing that she and Grace were better friends.