All My Sins Remembered

by Rosie Thomas

  Clio looked in the kitchen cupboards, but she couldn’t find anything left to eat. Miles seemed to have consumed everything. She went back into the tidy living room and stood at the window looking down into Gower Street. She toyed with the idea of going out to see Jake and Ruth, or calling in at the Fitzroy to see who might be there, but the business of going anywhere at all seemed to call for more energy than she possessed. In the end she went to bed with a book, and fell asleep over it long before Miles came home.

  The Parliamentary and political history was well documented. Elizabeth had researched it thoroughly from contemporary reports and family papers.

  Lady Grace Brock was elected to her late husband’s seat by a narrow majority of eighteen hundred votes over her Labour rival.

  She was introduced into Parliament just two days before the Christmas recess of 1929, to take her seat with the fourteen other women MPs of all parties. Grace’s sponsors were the Duchess of Atholl and Winston Churchill. Anthony had been Churchill’s friend, and Churchill had agreed to present his widow to the House even though he disliked the presence of women there in principle.

  Women in the House of Commons were no longer a novelty, but there was interest in Grace’s arrival because she was Anthony’s widow and because she had the reputation of a society butterfly. The House was full after Question Time, and the Press gallery was crowded.

  John Leominster only rarely took his seat in the House of Lords. He had even less interest in the proceedings of the Commons except when they affected his lands or the old order, and he nourished a profound dislike for Ramsay Macdonald and his government. Today, looking as if he wished he could be anywhere else in the world, he sat in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery with Nathaniel beside him. Blanche and Eleanor were with Clio in the Ladies’ Gallery.

  ‘I remember it clearly,’ Clio said. ‘I can see it all.’ Her ivory claw hands massaged the velvet arms of her chair in slow circles.

  Elizabeth waited patiently. She knew that Grace had arrived in the Chamber at a quarter to four and stood under the gallery at the far end while her sponsors took their places on either side of her. She knew that she was wearing a sombre but elegant dark blue coat and skirt, a plain white blouse and a tiny cocked hat, and she carried her election writ. Elizabeth had pored over the photographs and read every description because she prided herself on her conscientious research. She knew what had happened, but she let Clio tell her again.

  ‘After Question Time there was a silence,’ Clio said. ‘A whispering silence when we all leant forward, trying to see her. Then the Speaker looked down the Chamber. He called out, “Members desirous of taking their seats will come to the table.” I looked to one side and I saw my mother and my aunt, one profile seemingly superimposed on the other. They were so alike, even when they were old women. Then I saw Grace, walking down the aisle between Winston and the Duchess, and she looked like Blanche and Eleanor too, and I could see my own face in theirs, and I felt the ties between us all as strong as ropes. I loved her, then. I loved her, and I was proud of her.’

  Clio darted a glance at Cressida’s daughter to see what she made of that.

  ‘I’m sure you were,’ Elizabeth murmured.

  ‘She bowed to the House, and then she took the oath and read out the declaration, all in a wonderful strong voice. I remember thinking, if only Anthony could see her. I knew at that minute she was right to have stood, even … even before the work she did afterwards on improving conditions for women in prison and introducing nursery education for needy children and all the rest of it.’

  The old woman’s head sank forward, and one of the bird claws came up to support it. The effort of talking seemed to have exhausted her.

  ‘You are tired,’ Elizabeth said.

  The head lifted again at once, in determined contradiction.

  ‘There was a dinner party in the House that evening. Winston was there, and Tom and Cim Mosley, and some other friends of Grace’s, but I remember it best as a family party. Uncle John and Aunt Blanche, my mother and father, Hugo and Jake, we were like one family. I can’t remember any other time quite like that. We were all proud of her, you see. Whichever side we were on.’

  It was odd, Elizabeth thought, that the old lady should use just that phrase.

  Grace waited until the next sitting of Parliament to make her maiden speech. When she did speak, it was with Mr Baldwin’s permission in defence of the government’s Widows, Orphans and Old Age Pensions Bill. It was a good speech, and well received, and it was the beginning of her association with women’s and children’s interests.

  She began to make her mark. As her reputation grew, little by little the old criticisms were forgotten. She was not just Anthony Brock’s wife, or a frivolous socialite. She was a politician.

  Thirteen

  On the face of it, the next years were tranquil ones. Clio went patiently to work, and from Fathom to the Mothers’ Clinic, and from the Clinic home again to Gower Street and Miles. Anyone who saw her, even Jake and Ruth, might comfortably have assumed that she was happy.

  It was only Clio herself who knew otherwise.

  Sometimes she felt that she had no reason to be less than content and so, by the forces of logic, she should actually be content. It must be that her recollection of the exact quality of happiness was imprecise, that her memory tricked her, by favouring what was in the past and was no longer accessible over what she knew now and could not escape from. There was nothing wrong with her life, she told herself, except her own perverse nature.

  While these moods lasted she made herself take the slow steps through her routine with a sort of faltering optimism. If all was not well now, then some day it would be. Miles’s book would be finished and published to the proper acclaim; they would find a tune to their life together; she might even have a child.

  At other times she knew that she was deeply unhappy. The sickening inevitability of it clogged all her movements and made her weary and dull.

  Miles was the cause of her unhappiness, but he also provided the reason for continuing the unappetizing business of her life. She could think of no other explanation for her persistence in it. She no longer went to her job at Fathom for the pleasure or the interest of it, but to earn money. She apportioned the money very carefully, weighing every expenditure with miserly reluctance, so that it would stretch to supporting them both. She went out to the Clinic not because she wanted to give her help any longer, but in order to allow Miles peace and space to do his work. She did all this to hold on to their life together, but it was the life itself that was extinguishing her.

  However often her thoughts travelled the same circuit, she could never reach any conclusion. Everything she did was done for Miles; Miles did not repay her. She did not relish the life she had; she could not bear to think of changing it, for what would she do otherwise?

  But Clio’s sickened indecision was only a faint echo of Miles’s own.

  His changes of mood were terrifying because of their violence and unpredictability. For days, sometimes weeks at a time, he was subdued. He would work, sitting in his armchair with a lined notepad on his lap, scribbling feverishly and then tearing the sheets from the pad and crushing them as if he wanted to wring blood out of them. When he was not scribbling he would stare ahead into some invisible universe, glassy-eyed with desperation, and then he would drop his head into his hands and his whole body would seem to shrink into the shelter of the chair.

  At the lowest point he would turn to Clio, letting his head fall against her as she knelt beside him. ‘I can’t do it,’ he would whisper to her.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ she soothed him. It became an effort to put enough conviction into her voice. ‘Please, Miles. Won’t you let me read what there is, so I can reassure you?’

  He hissed at her, ‘No. I can’t. It’s like pulling out your own viscera for public show. You don’t understand anything, do you?’

  ‘I try to,’ Clio said humbly. ‘But I am not just the public. A
nd you let Tony Hardy read it, didn’t you?’

  ‘That sordid little money-grubber? Commerce is his only criterion. I don’t give a monkey’s fart for his ideas or his critical opinions. What does he know? Anyhow, that was long ago. I’ve rewritten every word since then, everything in it is new.’

  A terrible fear and suspicion were beginning to burn in Clio. She tried to pinch them out, but they always started to smoulder again. She was afraid that there was no everything, that there was no great novel at all.

  After Miles’s moods of depression, floods after drought, came the bursts of wild elation.

  He would gather up his notepads and lock them away, and burn every crumpled, discarded sheet. He would swell up out of his chair until he seemed to fill the untidy little rooms. He would eat all the food that Clio had laid in, destroying her thrifty menus for a week, and laugh at her for her bourgeois anxiety.

  ‘The Lord will provide,’ he would exult. ‘Inspiration and macaroni cheese together.’

  He would pull her close, kissing her with deliberate thoroughness until she felt herself unpeeling, like some bitter-skinned fruit, to reveal the pulp within her. She clung to him in her eagerness for his affection, but then Miles would stop what he was doing and look down at her. He would unwind his arms, very slowly, and then pat her shoulder, as if he had caught her in some act of indecency but was ready to forgive her.

  ‘Dear Piglet,’ he would murmur, and then he would wander away with his hands in his trouser pockets, or pick up a magazine and immediately become absorbed in it.

  Clio would be left feeling cold and deflated. She had no doubt that he enjoyed exercising his power over her, and she understood that he used it because he felt powerless in so many other directions. What she did not know was whether he tried deliberately to hurt her, and so to localize his general anger with an unfair world, or whether he simply did not understand that she loved him and needed his love in return.

  And then, in his moods of elation, Miles seemed to grow too large to be contained by the shabby walls of the flat.

  At best he would call to Clio, ‘Come on, haven’t we been cooped up in this place long enough? Let’s go out. Let’s go and have a few drinks and talk to people. I’m tired of long faces and tapwater.’

  He would seize her by the arm and march her off to Charlotte Street. They would join the group at the bar, any bar, standing rounds of drinks and accepting them in their turn, finding themselves sucked back into the tiny, greedy world of literary gossip. Clio would remember the old days and tell herself that nothing had changed except her own humour.

  At worst, and it was much more often, Miles would go out without her. Once or twice, he emptied her purse before he left. When he came back he would be drunk, either melancholy-drunk or violent-drunk, and shouting out his resentment of Fitzrovia, other men’s successes, and his shrinking wife.

  One night, looking for something on which to vent his rage, he blacked her eye. Clio told Jake that she had had one drink too many in the Fitzroy and had walked into the door in the ladies’ cloakroom. Her dissembling was so practised, had become so much second nature to her, that Jake believed her. She was vaguely surprised that her brother should be taken in by such a perfunctory lie.

  ‘You drink too much,’ Jake told her.

  Clio knew that there was a brandy bottle in the drawer of Jake’s surgery desk, because she had seen it once when Jake opened the drawer to look for something else.

  In the beginning, when his children were smaller and Ruth was too busy with them and with her work at the Mothers’ Clinic to have much attention to spare for him, Jake had bought the brandy and drunk a small tot after a long and more than usually disheartening surgery. The spirit had warmed him, and he had enjoyed the moment of calm and solitude, with the waiting room empty at last and his nurse gone home. He drank the measure and poured himself another. When he eventually went back to Islington, a little muzzy and vague in the head, the house had seemed untidy and unappealing. Ruth was banging plates in the kitchen and shouting at Lucas, but she did not seem to have noticed that Jake was late. Ruth was always busy and irritable. Jake knew that she had too much to do, but he saw that as her own choice. He resented her brusqueness, and the way that she turned heavily away from him in their bed at night and fell instantly into a deep sleep.

  The first bottle emptied itself and was replaced. The thought of his quiet moment with it at the end of the day became a comfort for Jake.

  Clio retorted, ‘You drink too much too. It’s the age we live in.’

  They looked sombrely at each other, where once they might have made a joke about their habits. The times were changing. The frivolity and youthful optimism of the Twenties seemed to have receded with their own youth, and much farther than just over the arbitrary cusp that separated them from the new decade.

  In the early years of the Thirties London seemed full of gaunt-faced men holding up placards that read, ‘I served my King and Country. All I ask is a Job.’ There were no jobs, and there appeared to be no policies that could create any. And in the pubs and studios, when conversation moved beyond the parochial concerns of publishing and painting, there had begun to be anxious talk of German rearmament. London had become a grim place, and life in it seemed beset by dreariness.

  In the memory the post-war years seemed quaint and much more remote in history than the real passage of time indicated. Clio’s feelings exactly matched her sense of the period. She could hardly believe that she had once been the bright-eyed ingénue who had followed Pilgrim to the Eiffel Tower and had begged Max Erdmann for a job. Had she once believed that to sit behind a typewriter in Doughty Street or to lift a half-pint beer glass in the Fitzroy was to allow herself the dizzy freedom of the wide world?

  The bitterness of her reflections brought her back to contemplation of her marriage. The cycle was unbreakable, a treadmill that went on through the days and into her dreams at night. Had she truly imagined that marriage to Miles would bring her the safety and calm, the fruitful and mutually rewarding literary partnership that she had longed for?

  More and more, the truth became plain to her. She could not, any longer, pervert it with optimism or excuses.

  Miles had married her to acquire a meal-ticket, a free bed with the drawback that it also contained her body, and an unpaid cook, cleaner and washerwoman. There was the added advantage, in his black fits, that she was unfailingly there to stroke his hair like a mother, and to shore up his weak and wandering ego.

  All this Clio came to understand perfectly well, in the years between 1929 and 1932. She also understood that Miles was all she had, and that however miserable she might be, to be without him would be worse. She had learned to devote herself to him, and she could not, now, think of anything else she might do with herself.

  Clio was vulnerable, but she had her pride. She had wanted to marry Miles, had even insisted upon it, and now that she found herself in this position she could not have borne to admit it to anyone. There were also a few occasions, very few but she clung to the thought of them with great tenacity, when Miles treated her with tenderness. She could not stop the old optimism from surging up, then.

  As the months passed, to all outward appearances Clio was a happy wife, and a busy and useful contributor to her world. Eleanor’s veiled hints about the possibility of more grandchildren were obscure enough for Clio to pretend she did not hear them.

  Grace sold the house in South Audley Street and moved with Cressida to a much smaller establishment near the river in Westminster. The little house was decorated and furnished with Grace’s usual flair but, once the work was done and they were installed, Grace seemed to feel that the place required no more of her attention. She entertained her new political allies in the upstairs drawing room, and gave occasional small dinners, but Vincent Street served her more as an extension of the House than as a home.

  It was Blanche’s suggestion that Nanny Brodribb should come down from Stretton to look after Cressida in the simpli
fied household, and Grace agreed at once. Thereafter Cressida saw much more of Nanny than she did of Grace herself.

  Grace devoted her time and energy to politics. She was often in the House until late at night; she spoke regularly on her pet topics; and she sat on the numerous committees that dealt with women’s and children’s rights. There were regular trips north to the constituency, where she was popular with the local party and with the voters. She held her seat, with an increased majority, in the General Election of 1931, and under the National Government headed by Macdonald and Stanley Baldwin she began to be spoken of as a coming young woman. Her energy and stamina were apparently boundless.

  Grace had discovered that work was an effective painkiller.

  She had never done any before now, except for carrying trays up to Eleanor’s convalescents during the war, and she was surprised by her own ability to concentrate on what she was doing. If she kept the Indian Women’s Franchise Bill in the front of her mind then she could make herself forget, for quite long stretches of time, that Anthony was dead and she was alone.

  The Vincent Street house contained few reminders of him, except in Cressida’s room where photographs lined the bureau and shelves, but its very smallness and silence made her remember how different the other house had been. She was glad to leave it behind in the morning, and she never hurried back to it at night.

  Cressida was eleven. Grace had found a small private school for her in Pimlico, where the fees were reasonable and most of the other girls were the daughters of Army widows or disabled officers.

  Nanny walked her there in the mornings and met her at the end of the day. Cressida was not exactly unpopular with her fellows, but she simply preferred not to enter into the intense friendships that the others enjoyed. They stopped asking her to tea at their houses because Cressida never accepted, and she did not invite anyone to come back to Vincent Street. She was happier to eat her tea in the kitchen alone with Nanny and Cook, who ran the house between them with the help of a daily, and then to go upstairs to read, or draw, or write stories for herself. The stories were always written in lined exercise books, bought with her pocket money from a corner newsagent on the way home from school. The stories were almost always about tiny domestic crises befalling happy, loving families. The crises were easily resolved. Cressida knew that her stories were dull, and she preferred them that way.