by Rosie Thomas
Grace laughed. ‘Don’t think of it. Everyone longs to be thin, you know. Ferocious diets, suffering for every single chocolate, all that. You keep your lovely narrow hips and count yourself lucky.’
Alice flushed with pleasure. Compliments on her appearance did not often come her way in the Woodstock Road. Grace was thin, too. The bones of her hips seemed to jut through the silk jersey she wore belted over a pleated skirt. But at the same time, Alice could not help noticing Cressida standing half hidden behind her father. Her eyes were fixed on the floor, as if she were fascinated by the veining in the marble.
Cressida was plump. She seemed to be made of cushions of plumpness riding on big bones. Her tweed coat was tightly belted around her middle, making her torso look like a pair of solid pillows. She was holding on to her father’s hand.
‘I used to be huge,’ Alice offered into the thin air. No one said anything, and she found her voice trailing away. ‘Before I got the measles.’
Grace was already tapping away, peeling off her long gloves and lifting her hat from her short, waved hair. ‘Oh yes, some tea, please. You wouldn’t believe the traffic on the A1. Where can they all be going? In the saloon, Mummy?’
Anthony said to Cressida, ‘You remember Alice, Cressida, don’t you?’
But Cressida wouldn’t look at her.
Alice thought that Anthony Brock was rather nice, too. He had a funny, attractive gap between his front teeth and an expression that seemed to indicate that he always saw the amusing side of what went on around him. Alice admired the way that he opened doors for Grace and settled her in the chair and clicked his gold lighter for her cigarettes, without ever acting like her appendage. He seemed very capable and strong and masculine. He was quite unlike her own brothers, or her mild, shambling, quizzical father. She decided that she would like just such a husband for herself when the time came, although the thought made her blush even in the privacy of her bedroom. Alice was prudish for her age, although she had spent years trying to be as knowing as Tabby and Phoebe.
She hadn’t understood, until the Brocks arrived, just how lonely she had been. Grace’s feminine camaraderie and Anthony’s friendliness were like a warm wind in spring. Alice opened to them like a flower.
It was a sign of Blanche’s optimistic vagueness that she had assumed that Alice and Cressida would be company for one another. Cressida was not quite nine. The girls regarded each other across a divide in years that was widened even further by Cressida’s hostility.
Alice tried to be friendly at first. Her eyes had just been opened to this new, glamorous phenomenon of Grace and Anthony, and she wanted to talk about them. She imagined, wrongly, that Cressida would be willing to share, not exactly secrets, but snippets of gossip that would enable Alice to feel that she was remotely part of their family.
‘I do think your mother is pretty,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe she’s my first cousin. I mean, she’s practically Clio’s twin.’
Clio wore serviceable clothes and talked about art and literature and worked in her spare time in one of Jake’s peculiar clinics.
‘Where does she get her hair done like that? Does she go to a smart salon in Mayfair, or does her – um – maid do it or something?’
‘I don’t know,’ Cressida said, staring out of the window.
Alice tried again. ‘Do you think your father will win the seat?’
‘I don’t know.’ But then, with surprising animation, ‘I hope not, if it means he’s going to be away and busy all the time.’
Alice was shocked. ‘How can you hope that?’
‘I can hope whatever I like. He’s my father.’
‘Yes, but he’d be a fine MP. Don’t you think?’
‘I hate politics,’ Cressida muttered. ‘And I wouldn’t tell you what I think.’ She stood up, still not looking at Alice, and walked away. Her wool plaid dress was tight on her and decorated with a dainty white piqué collar and cuffs edged with lace, as if Grace bought clothes for a child who in her mind’s eye was small and slender.
At last, Alice saw the two cars coming up the driveway. She threw her book aside and ran.
Grace and Anthony came in together, laughing. There were several men with them wearing dark clothes and big blue rosettes, and there was Hugo leaning on his stick. Alice was so anxious for news of the polling that she slipped through the cheery group and went straight to Grace.
‘What happened? Will we win?’
The men in the dark suits all looked at her. Hugo made an irritable movement as if to brush her aside but Grace swung round, her smile like a beacon.
‘Oh darling, what a day. All the gaffers and grannies and the women and children. In and out of the cars, up hill and down dale, out you come and vote for us, vote for Anthony Brock. It was such fun, you would have adored it.’ Grace waved her gloves in the air, like a flag.
I would have done, Alice thought. She could smell and almost taste Grace’s exhilaration, and the glittering force of it drew her like a magnet. The cars, and the men, and stuffy Hugo and even the gaffers and grannies and constituency politics were bathed in the Brocks’ glamour. She ached to be part of it all. The blue rosettes were like the membership insignia of some grand order. The order was to do with old England and country tradition and the proper way of doing things, but it was also spiced with pearls and perfume and wafted in fast cars.
‘Grace was marvellous,’ Anthony said kindly to Alice. ‘She got all the people out, charmed them to the polling stations and back again. If we win, it will be more thanks to her than to me.’
Grace put her arm through his and kissed him on the cheek. ‘No, it won’t. It will be because they want you.’
A jovial man rubbed his hands. ‘The signs are good, either way. No counting any chickens yet, mind you.’
Hugo said impatiently, ‘Gentlemen, come through and have a drink. We have all earned one.’
‘I wouldn’t say no to a whisky and soda,’ said another red-faced man who held a round bowler hat by the brim.
‘Where’s Cress?’ Anthony asked.
‘Upstairs, I think,’ Alice said. She knew that he was going to ask her to fetch her down, but Grace put her hand on his arm.
‘Have a drink first,’ she murmured.
The group moved off, with Grace at its heart, towards the small drawing room. Alice watched them, wistfully. Grace looked back over her shoulder, and winked at her. Alice would have died for her.
Cressida was stupid. Why wasn’t she here, why hadn’t she come down to see her marvellous parents?
‘She’s sweet, Alice, isn’t she?’ Grace was saying to Hugo as they went through. ‘She reminds me so much of Clio at that age, and me too, I suppose. So eager, and hungry for something to happen, any old thing.’
The polls were closed. There was a large party for dinner at Stretton that evening. The agent was there and his wife, and some of the other party officials, and the local Tory grandees with their wives in old-fashioned jewels and stiff gowns with capes and tiers that released the smell of mothballs. Hugo and Thomas, bachelor sons, were gallant to the ladies and the candidate moved smoothly amongst their menfolk, thanking them for their hard work and a good, clean, well-fought campaign. Blanche wore her emeralds with blue velvet and tried to interest herself in the conversations about Mr Baldwin and the free market and the League of Nations. John Leominster was almost genial. It was the kind of gathering he liked best, outside the hunting season. He was amongst his own people, who knew their place, and his. He was pleased with his son-in-law, who would make a decent Member, and with Grace’s support of him. The evening went well.
Cressida went to bed early, after having drunk the cup of hot milk that Nanny Brodribb considered essential to a good night’s rest. She had won a precious twenty minutes with her father before he changed for dinner, and she had heard the news of the day. Grace had looked in for a moment on her way down, and waved a kiss at her.
Cressida pulled the covers up over her head. She liked he
r bed, and the comfort of sleep.
Alice sat up, watching the guests arrive from her bedroom window. Later she went out on to the stairs to listen, but she could only hear a confused hum of voices, and there was nothing to see but the heads of the footmen passing to and fro beneath her.
Downstairs in the dining room the candles were lit. The glow reflected off the massively ugly silver epergne in the centre of the table and softened the faces drawn up on either side of it.
Grace looked down to Anthony, sitting on Blanche’s left hand. His hair was watered smooth. He looked handsome and happy. Then he glanced up and caught her eye. There was a flicker of amused complicity between them that acknowledged the frowsty company, the tedium of the talk, and the sense of their duty being soundly done. Then Grace bent her head smilingly to her dinner companion, the man with the red face. She still felt the chord vibrating between her husband and herself. They were together, working in unison. She loved him; she was very nearly content.
The gentlemen came out to rejoin the ladies almost as soon as Blanche withdrew. It was time for Anthony and his party workers to drive to Ludlow, where the count was taking place, for the declaration.
‘Are you ready?’ Anthony whispered as he draped Grace’s wrap around her shoulders.
‘For anything,’ she responded. She meant that if they lost this time, well then, they would try again, and again. But she did not think they would lose.
They drove back through the winding lanes, the cars’ headlamps cutting yellow wedges through the early summer dark. They found a press of people waiting at the hall, with photographers from the national as well as the local papers amongst them.
‘Lady Grace spotters,’ Anthony laughed, but Grace insisted that they were there to see Anthony, not her.
The other two candidates and their supporters were waiting in a stuffy room at the back of the hall. When Grace and Anthony joined them there was some handshaking and self-conscious joking, and then a tedious wait before the result could be declared. At last they were shepherded in an awkward group out on to the platform where the Mayor was presiding as returning officer. They stood with their heads bent while he recited the preamble in a sonorous voice.
The names came, with Anthony Patrick Earley Brock first in the alphabetical order, and the number of votes cast. Grace was listening so hard that she heard only a meaningless jumble of recited thousands, half drowned by cheering. She looked round in bewilderment and saw Anthony step forward with his arm raised, acknowledging the cheers. He had won. Not handsomely, but he had won.
Anthony Brock, MP.
Grace went to stand beside him, smiling into the flashbulbs. Her heart sang. The dull dinner and the round of provincial pleasantries that had led to this moment were forgotten. It had all been worthwhile. She was thinking of Westminster, and of Anthony’s coming rapid rise through the Parliamentary party. She was dreaming of the Cabinet, and the possibility of Number Ten itself, and of her own role at his side. They stood proudly together on the platform, receiving their due congratulations at the beginning of it all.
Tomorrow, there would be photographs in the later editions. They would no longer be captioned ‘That bright young man Mr Anthony Brock and lovely, party-going Lady Grace.’ They would be ‘The new member for West Shropshire and his wife, political hostess Lady Grace Brock.’ Grace smiled. Not yet, maybe. But soon, soon enough.
The two girls heard the news in the early morning, when they came down to breakfast and found Anthony sitting alone at the table with the newspapers.
‘Oh, how utterly wonderful, hooray,’ Alice cried. ‘I knew you were going to win it, I just knew.’ She ran round the table and flung her arms around him, forgetting in her rejoicing to be shy or in awe.
‘Are you pleased, Daddy?’ Cressida asked, muted in the face of Alice’s enthusiasm.
‘You know, I am, rather.’
‘Then I am, too, of course. Congratulations,’ Cressida said gamely. Her plump cheeks looked pinched, as if invisible thumbs pressed into them, leaving white hollows in the flesh.
Clio read the result in the newspaper. She folded the paper and propped it against her coffee cup so that she could study the photograph more closely. She decided that Anthony looked satisfied, in his modest and undramatic way, and that Grace, with her small neat head rising out of a cloud of furs, looked indecently exultant.
‘It sounds like a Labour government, then. I don’t see how Baldwin can hope to carry on, do you?’ Julius said, glancing up from The Times. ‘Is there any more of that coffee?’
‘I’ll make some,’ she smiled at him. ‘Is this in yours?’ She passed the Mail across the table and went into the kitchen with the coffee pot.
Julius looked at Grace. It was more than a year since he had seen her, much longer than that since they had exchanged more than superficial family talk. He couldn’t even remember when they had last been alone together. But the unexpected thought of her could still dislocate the steady, colourless structure of his life. It was as if he suddenly lost his balance on familiar ground, slipped and had to grasp at the displaced features of the landscape as they whistled past him and he fell. He was a successful violinist, in London for a series of recitals. He was staying in the old flat, with Clio. He had a routine; it was a little anaemic and lonely, it was true, but he was not uncomfortable.
And he was still in love with Grace, as he had always been.
The difference was that simply to love her had once been enough. He had been calm and content, taking pleasure in the knowledge that she existed, and that there was time, and a world of opportunity. But now Julius felt the beginnings of disappointment. He considered his life, and recognized that there was nothing in it but his music. There had been one drunken night, long ago, with that red-haired model of Pilgrim’s. Jeannie. He did not want to remember what had happened. There had been two girls, at different times, in Paris, both of them only briefly. For a long time now there had been no one at all.
I am not yet thirty, Julius thought. And I already feel dried up, as if my bones are rubbing together inside me.
He studied the picture. Even through the blur of newsprint, through the coarse dots that swam together to make an approximation of her features, he could see that Grace was growing more beautiful. The fact that he loved her seemed irrelevant, pathetic even. It was the weary obsession of a lonely man, doomed through his own weakness to worship the icon left over from his adolescence.
Julius smiled, his mouth making a thin curve. He knew all this, and he loved her none the less.
Clio came back with the coffee pot and leant over his shoulder to pour. Julius tossed the folded paper back across the table. ‘They look pleased with themselves,’ he said.
‘Anthony deserved to win. And I’m sure he’ll make a good, solid, Tory MP. Pity for him it will have to be in opposition.’
‘Unless there’s a Liberal coalition.’
They began to talk about the election result. They were circumspect with each other when Grace was mentioned.
They had finished their coffee when Clio heard the rattle of the morning’s post falling into the wire basket behind the letter-box. She left the table and ran to collect it.
When she came back she was sorting a sheaf of letters.
‘Two for you,’ she announced, holding them out. ‘Bills and boring things for me.’
Julius saw that there was a blue envelope in the pocket of her Chinese robe – the same bright silk robe copied long ago from Grace’s wardrobe. And a moment or two later she slipped away from the breakfast table and went to her room, to read the letter in private.
Julius watched her go. He had already guessed that Clio was in love. Her increasingly habitual wryness had suddenly softened into a more gentle hesitancy, and the lines of her face had softened with it. She looked younger and prettier, sometimes almost girlish. She also, he noticed, took much more trouble over her appearance. Her stockings and gloves were carefully mended instead of being allowed to run into
holes, and she had begun to wear coloured scarves at the necks of her jumpers, and smart little head-hugging hats. On her dressing table, when he had looked into her bedroom in search of aspirins, he had caught a glimpse of Elizabeth Arden’s foundation cream, and a pot of the vaseline that she rubbed on to her eyelids.
Julius was pleased for her. He wondered who the man could be.
Clio sat down on her bed, breathless with anticipation, and carefully slit open the blue envelope. She had only seen Miles yesterday, when they had lunched rather unsatisfactorily together. He had been preoccupied over his escalope Milanese, although she had tried hard to divert him with Fathom gossip, and he had left quite abruptly before the waiter had brought the pudding menu. But Miles often wrote a letter immediately after they had met, especially if it had not been one of their happiest encounters, and his letters were invariably delightful.
She unfolded the thin sheet of blue paper and read: ‘How is the dear little piglet this morning? Has she brushed her bristles and buffed her trotters ready for the day?’ There was a drawing of a piglet beside the words, with a corkscrew tail and a broad smile. ‘But perhaps she thinks that her big bad pig was altogether too bad and piggified yesterday, to run off when she was being so sweet and good in trying to cheer him up?’ Another piglet, this time with a ferocious scowl.
If she does she is quite right, and he sends her herewith a penitent kiss and plea that she will not bother her pretty piglet head with his vain moods. He is worried about his work and his bad debts and 1,000 other boring and unpig-wig details that he would not dream of whispering to her, only hoping that she will forgive him his ill humour and let him take her out for a slap-up piggy dinner just as soon as his ship comes in.
(A cheque any day now, Tony Hardy has sworn on his life.)
In the meantime, shall he slip into the office just for the briefest of minutes this afternoon, perhaps to persuade the princess of piglets to dip her snout into a glass of beer with him?