by Rosie Thomas
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.