by Rosie Thomas
And then, as if she had conjured them out of the sea of memories, the nurse appeared, and the girl with her. The girl had long hair, and she was wearing it loose over her shoulders today. Clio eyed it with disapproval. She did not consider it a suitable coiffure for a girl who was not really a girl at all, but a woman of almost forty.
The woman sat down opposite her, and the nurse brought them tea on a tray. Clio didn’t want any tea, but she took the cup anyway.
‘You are not too tired, are you?’ Elizabeth asked. The nurse had warned her that her patient was confused and anxious today.
‘I am not tired at all,’ Clio lied.
The girl was Cressida Brock’s daughter, of course. And so she was also Pilgrim’s granddaughter, sitting opposite his masterpiece, which she plainly did not care for at all. The realization made Clio want to laugh.
Clio wondered if they had ever talked about Pilgrim, or if she had only imagined it. Elizabeth’s questions confused her. She could remember the exact configuration of the patterned linoleum in the old schoolroom in the Woodstock Road, but she could not remember if Cressida’s daughter had been here with her questions yesterday, or if it had been last week, or a month ago.
The days played tricks on her now.
Clio could not remember what she had already told the girl and what was still mute memory. She was afraid that she was repeating herself, the stories that she knew to be innocent, in an attempt to suppress what must not be told.
The secrets grew harder to keep with the passage of time.
The dark twin was always with her, the sin she had committed. A sudden longing to confess it swept up inside her, breaking through the careful silence of the decades that seemed no longer as imperative as the truth.
Clio thought that the girl with her long, loose hair looked like Ophelia in a pre-Raphaelite painting. The thoughts crossed and tangled in her mind.
She said loudly, ‘Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered.’
That was exactly right. Her sin must be remembered, and this long-haired nymph with her recording machine had been sent to her for the purpose of hearing her confession.
‘What was that?’ Elizabeth asked.
The stupid girl probably didn’t know her Shakespeare at all. What had the line been? Clio realized that she had forgotten it already, and it was so very important.
‘What was I saying?’ She shook her head in bewilderment.
‘Don’t worry. It will come back. There’s plenty of time.’
Elizabeth felt less calm than she sounded. The truth was that she did not have plenty of time. She must finish the book soon.
She knew objectively that she shouldn’t spend any more time with Clio. She had already told her everything she remembered about her cousin from more than fifty years ago.
And yet, something still drew her back to Little Venice, to sit under the terrible portrait. Clio had been closer to Grace than anyone, and she had been deeply shocked by her death. There was probably nothing there, but Elizabeth was still waiting for some extra insight into Grace’s life. Some story, perhaps, that she had not heard before.
She repeated. ‘There’s plenty of time.’ And she was thinking, Just give me something, Clio. Just one little extra spark will help me to get the bloody book finished, and I’ll put you in it too.
Clio said, more to herself than to Cressida’s daughter, ‘I don’t think so.’
The child was mistaken. There was not much time.
She stirred in her chair. ‘I want to talk about the flood. Are you listening to me?’
As calmly as she could, Elizabeth told her, ‘I know all about the flood, Aunt Clio. Grace’s drowning is very well documented. There are contemporary news reports, diaries, letters. They all describe what happened, and I have read everything there is. It must have been dreadful.’
‘I didn’t write any diary,’ Clio said.
‘No.’
‘And I am the only person who knows what really happened.’
‘What did happen, Aunt Clio?’
Clio took a great breath. She tried to look round, over her own shoulder, to see the portrait for the last time. But the back of her chair was too high, and she found that she was too weak to crane sideways.
‘I killed Grace.’
Elizabeth’s eyes flicked to the door, in search of the day nurse. Clio was wandering again. She was also prone to making wild claims, Elizabeth had learnt that. It was as if she was afraid that her own story was not quite interesting enough; perhaps she had sensed all along that no one would really want to write or read her biography.
Elizabeth reddened guiltily, and leant forward to flick the stop button. Gently she said, ‘But Grace was caught in a flood, when the sea-wall gave way. She was swept away, no one could have saved her.’
Clio only repeated, ‘I killed her. I wouldn’t open the door to her. I wanted her to die.’
Her bright eyes had clouded. She stared straight ahead of her, into vacancy.
Elizabeth insisted, ‘No, Aunt Clio, she was swept away. She didn’t reach the door, did she? You felt guilty because you were saved and she was dead, isn’t that it? Grace was your friend, almost your twin. But you couldn’t have done anything to save her. You mustn’t believe it could have been any different. You never said anything about this before, did you? Your memory is playing tricks on you.’
Clio sank back in her chair, and closed her eyes.
‘I am tired now.’
All my sins, she thought.
Hamlet, that was it. ‘All my sins remembered.’
She did remember. She had forgotten so much else, but never that. She had kept the secret of Grace and the flood, and that in itself had been a sin. There had been times when she had longed to tell the truth, to people she had loved and to others, strangers caught with her in the fleeting intimacy of ships and aeroplanes and hotels, but she had kept her secret. The necessity of keeping it had been a great burden, and the solitary shouldering of it had been part of her punishment.
Now the secret was told. Clio was weary and her body ached, but she felt better. Lighter, and stronger, like a girl again, as if a weight had floated away from her.
Elizabeth nodded and began to pack away her tape-recorder and her notebook. There was nothing else to learn; she must tell the story that she already knew. When she was ready to leave she hesitated, looking down at the shrunken face.
Clio opened her eyes. ‘What were we just talking about?’
Elizabeth smiled at her. ‘The old things,’ she answered.
She left Clio to doze in her chair, and went away to tell the nurse that she would let herself out.
When the front door had closed on the brief rattle of street noise the nurse came briskly through the quiet house. She bent over Clio in the chair, and then put her warm hand over her patient’s tiny clawed one.
‘Come along, Mrs Wolf, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s time for your rest.’
Clio nodded, smiling a little, ready to sleep.
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About the Author
Rosie Thomas is the author of a number of celebrated novels, including the bestselling The Kashmir Shawl. A keen adventurer, she has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, trekked in the footsteps of Shackleton in South Georgia, and travelled in Ladakh and Kashmir. She lives in London.
Also by Rosie Thomas
Celebration
Follies
Sunrise
The White Dove
Strangers
Bad Girls, Good Women
A Woman of Our Times
All My Sins Remembered
Other People’s Marriages
A Simple Life
Every Woman Knows a Secret
Moon Island
White
The Potter’s House
If My Father Loved Me
Sun At Midnight
Iris and Ruby
Constance
Lovers and Newcomers
The Kashmir Shawl
The Illusionists
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in the United Kingdom in 1991 by Michael Joseph
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1991
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © MAR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560578
Version: [2014-02-26]
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