by Rosie Thomas
After the hubbub was over and the house had swallowed the voices up once more, it was a long, slow hour and more before Peter heard them coming along the passage to his room. He sat up against his pillows, watching the door.
Clio was the first to appear, with pink cheeks and bright eyes, as he had first seen her. She was followed by two tall young men who had to stoop to pass under the door lintel.
Peter’s first impression, born out of his upper-class Anglo-Scots prejudice, was that they looked large and strange and exotic, unmistakable Jewish. He had noticed none of this strangeness in Clio. The two young men were like their huge, black-bearded father, and Clio took after her aristocratic mother. But then, when they came closer to shake his hand, he saw the strength of the family likeness. It was especially marked between Clio and Julius. It was as if the addition of her brothers made him see Clio afresh, in a different context. Her duality seemed less puzzling, then.
Jake was friendly and direct. He sat on the end of the bed and talked to Peter about where he had been fighting, and about his injuries and recovery. Julius was quieter. Peter noticed that his wrists protruded from the sleeves of his coat, and that his hands were long and pale with broad, spatulate tips to the fingers. He asked if Peter played chess and diffidently offered to give him a game, later, after the birthday party.
Clio looked from one to the other of the three faces, with a mixture of pride and anxiety. It seemed very important that they should all like one another.
Eleanor called them. ‘Jacob! I need you to help to move this table. Why is poor Grace left to do all the work?’
They stood up obediently. ‘Can’t you come down and join the party?’ Julius asked.
‘Peter’s eyesight is affected, he has to keep still, the doctors won’t let …’ Clio broke off, blushing, knowing that she had betrayed her loving concern. Her brothers grinned.
‘Next time,’ Peter said, smiling at her. ‘But I would like to meet Grace. To complete the set.’ He saw, in the three faces, three different reactions to her name. Julius’s was the least ambivalent.
‘You will,’ Clio promised. ‘I’ll make her come up.’
Alice sat the head of the long table. She was wearing her best white muslin dress and a crown that Tabby had made for her out of gold paper. Tabby was always happier to celebrate other people’s birthdays than to be the focus of attention on her own. Nathaniel and Eleanor sat on her right and left hands, and down the length of the table were the Hirsh children, Julius and Jake vying with each other to make Alice laugh and encouraging her to an even higher pitch of excitement, three or four little girls who were Alice’s friends and who stared at her brothers with big, round eyes, and Oswald Harris and his wife and children. Grace sat at the far end, facing Alice.
On the white linen cloth there were the remains of jewel-coloured jellies and iced cakes, with ribbons and favours and fondant sweets. Grace watched Mrs Doyle come in with the birthday cake. It was chocolate and cream, with a ruff of the same gold paper as Alice’s crown.
Nathaniel beamed with paternal pleasure as Alice seized the bone-handled knife from Mrs Doyle. He looked across the table at his wife, celebrating in the exchanged glance another year of family life, Jake’s safe return and recovery, the quiet continuation of the domestic happiness.
‘My cake! I cut it,’ Alice shouted.
Grace thought that she could not stomach much more of this joyful family harmony. In a little while there would be singing, and then noisy party games. Just for the moment, she had had enough of Hirsh good humour and wholesome merrymaking. Birthdays and family occasions at Stretton and Belgrave Square were more sombre, restrained events. This party, today, made her feel rebellious and contrary.
She pushed her chair back, and slipped away from the table, murmuring an inaudible excuse. Only Julius saw her go.
It was pleasant to be out of the overheated room. She wandered slowly up the stairs. The upper part of the house was cool and silent. She came to the door of the turret room, and gently pushed it open.
Peter was asleep. Grace stood beside the bed, looking down at him. He was rather beautiful, she thought. He looked like a marble knight on a tomb. She had to lean down, until her face almost touched his, before she could hear the faint sigh of his breathing.
Grace smiled suddenly. She wanted to warm the cold marble and bring the effigy to life.
It was her last visit. She had no idea, still, what it was like to be Clio, and she understood that the notion was ridiculous. After this she would be Grace entirely. But for now, in this hour while Alice’s party went on downstairs, she felt that she was anonymous.
She reached up to the buttons that fastened the neck of her dress. It was her best afternoon dress, silk in tiny stripes of lavender and cream. She undid the pearl buttons, and the dress rustled down around her ankles. Grace stepped away from it, feeling the cool air on her bare arms and shoulders. She lifted the bedcovers and Peter stirred in his sleep. Grace lay down beside him, and drew the covers over them both.
Then she turned to him and put her arm around his neck. She felt that her own body was a matter of soft curves and recesses, whereas Peter’s was all bone and sharp angles. She let her breath warm his cheek, and then she reached with the tip of her tongue to the corner of his mouth.
Peter opened his eyes and looked directly into hers. She was afraid that he could see straight through into her head.
As soon as he woke up, Peter knew that it was not Clio in his bed. This girl did not look like Jake and Julius. She was rounder, fuller-lipped, more English. There was a dress lying on the floor, in shadow now but where he had watched the square of light move that morning, and it was not Clio’s hyacinth blue.
Peter was used to dreams, to apparitions that were more vivid than dreams. This one was as welcome as the others were unwelcome. He didn’t try to talk, or to define the mysterious boundary between sleeping and waking. He put his arm around her waist, and his mouth against her bare shoulder.
‘Zuleika,’ he whispered.
Outside in the Woodstock Road a car drew up. It was a dark green Bullnose Morris, driven by a young man in flying goggles and leather gauntlets. He jumped from the driver’s seat and strolled around to open the door for his passenger, another young man. The passenger put one hand on the driver’s shoulder and carefully negotiated the high step to the ground. Then he held on to the polished chrome door handle while his friend took a pair of wooden crutches from behind the seats and fitted them under his armpits.
‘Very good of you, Farmy,’ Hugo said. ‘Won’t you come in and have a drink? My aunt and uncle will be glad to see you.’
‘No, thanks all the same, Culmington. Little girls’ birthday parties are not quite my métier. Big girls’ quite different, of course. Let me just see you to the door, won’t you?’
Hugo moved quickly on his crutches. One leg of his flannel trousers, empty, was rolled up and pinned neatly just below the knee. He was already ringing the bell when Farmiloe held up a parcel.
‘Don’t forget the present. Enjoy yourself.’
Nelly opened the front door. Through the open drawing-room door beyond Hugo could see a line of cushions, and a dozen pairs of flying feet. Someone was thumping out a Strauss waltz on the piano. The games were in progress.
‘Hugo, Hugo.’
Alice saw him first. Musical bumps were abandoned as the Hirshes came flooding out into the hall.
‘Happy birthday, miss.’ Alice was a favourite of Hugo’s. He held the present above her head, so she had to jump for it.
‘Be careful, Alice,’ Eleanor scolded. ‘Hugo, this is wonderfully good of you.’
‘I’m not an invalid, Aunt Eleanor, I don’t know about good. College tea is a poor show on Saturdays. Is there anything left?’
Grace and Peter did not hear the new arrival. They only heard the rasp of one another’s breathing, and the rustle of clothes, and the small squeak of the iron bedstead.
They could not have heard Hug
o asking, ‘Where’s Grace? Not in a sulk, somewhere, is she?’
But if they had been listening they would have heard the quick clicking of Eleanor’s heels as she came along the linoleum corridor. She had not been able to find Grace in the garden, nor in her bedroom, so she could not have retired with a headache. The only possibility was that she had looked in to see if any of the patients needed anything. Eleanor was thinking that it was considerate of her, with the rest of the household so busy elsewhere.
When it opened, the door seemed to admit a wedge of cold blue light into the room. Peter felt it touch him, and freeze him. Eleanor stood in the coldness of it, staring at them in silence, for what seemed an eternity.
‘Grace.’
He understood then, but only then.
‘Nemesis was swift and awful,’ Jake said afterwards. He was the only one of them who could joke about it; even much later. For Julius, it was the time when he began to understand that he was a spectator in Grace’s concerns, not a participant.
Grace was sent back to London, to Blanche, in the deepest disgrace. She spent the remainder of the year, until the war ended, yoked to a series of chaperones and fulfilling a round of charity work and visits with her mother.
She always claimed thereafter that those months were the most miserable of her life.
Peter Dennis returned to the hospital, and Nathaniel wrote a stiffly worded letter to his commanding officer. Before the ambulance came to take him away, defiant and dry-eyed Grace managed to insinuate herself into his room for the last time. She was supposed to be folding linen in a cubbyhole downstairs, but she had walked through the house with her head held up and no one had come out to intercept her.
‘I wanted to say goodbye,’ she told him. ‘Even though we haven’t been properly introduced.’
Peter stared at her in incomprehension. He could not imagine what it was that drove Grace to pretend carelessness, even comedy, when he could see that she was miserable. He was wondering how what had seemed with Clio to be innocent and natural should have become a matter for shame and public humiliation, because of Grace. He felt ashamed when he remembered what he had done with this mutinous girl, letting himself believe that she was Clio.
‘I suppose the gentlemanly course would be to ask you to marry me.’ He thought sentimentally of marrying Clio, the impossible outcome.
Grace gave a harsh spurt of laughter. ‘I’m not ready to marry anyone yet. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t feel that you should apologize.’
Grace didn’t seem to flinch. She held out her hand. ‘Won’t you say goodbye?’
There was something determined about her, a toughness that he disliked but could not deny. At last he held out his hand in return. Grace shook it, and then turned without another word and went back to folding the linen, waiting for her father’s chauffeur to come and take her away.
In the hours before the ambulance arrived Peter waited and wished, but Clio didn’t come.
It was Clio who suffered most. She could not bring herself to go up to the turret room again, imagining Grace there. She didn’t want to see her brothers’ sympathetic, speculative expressions, or her mother’s anxiety, or Nathaniel’s disappointment. She wanted to be with Peter as they had been before Alice’s birthday party, and that possibility was gone for ever. She sat in her bedroom, listening to the timid sounds of the shocked household, until Grace came.
No one overheard what passed between Clio and Grace before the chauffeur came, and neither of them ever talked of it afterwards.
It was Clio’s anger that made Grace realize the final absurdity of having tried to imitate her. She had expected tears or temper, but nothing like the bitter fury that Clio turned on her. For all their seventeen years together, she had never properly known her cousin.
‘You have to have everything, don’t you?’ Clio had whispered. Her eyes were like black holes in her white face. ‘You have to take everything for yourself. You don’t really want it, because you don’t know what you want, but you can’t bear anything to belong to someone else.
‘That was how it was with Jake and Julius, wasn’t it? Not loving them for themselves, but just demonstrating that you could have them, mesmerize them.’
Grace tried to laugh. ‘I’m not a hypnotist.’ But Clio’s cold face froze her.
‘No. You’re a liar, a deceiver. And you saw what I felt about Peter, so you had to wreck it, didn’t you?’
‘Clio, that’s not true. He mistook me for you. I thought it would be like Blanche and Eleanor, when they were girls. It was a way of being closer to you …’
There was too little time, and Grace knew at once that the hasty elision of what she had really felt was the wrong explanation.
Clio spat at her. ‘You are not close to me. I hate you, Grace. I want to kill you.’
Grace faltered. ‘No, you don’t. I did something stupid and thoughtless, and I regret it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
Clio shook her head. The anger inside her seemed to expand, stretching taut the skin of her face, tightening her scalp over her skull. The blood throbbed behind her eyes, and she wanted to reach out her fingers to Grace’s throat, to squeeze the soft, startled smile off her face.
In a small smothered voice she said, ‘After all this time. After living here, with us. I hate you. I could easily kill you.’
Grace’s own anger rose up in response. ‘Living here? With you complacent, condescending Hirshes? Who are you, after all? What do you know?’
‘Go away, Grace. Go away now, before I hit you.’ Clio ran across the room, and flung the door open. Ida the housemaid’s frightened face was revealed on the other side, her hand raised to knock.
‘The car is here, Lady Grace,’ Ida mumbled.
From her window, Clio watched Grace’s boxes being stowed in the dicky. She didn’t move until Grace had taken her seat, stiff-backed, until the chauffeur had closed the door on her and swung his starting handle, until the car had rolled away and out of sight down the length of the Woodstock Road.
Two hours later, from the same place, she saw Peter’s wheelchair rolled up the ramp into the high-sided ambulance. She didn’t know where they were taking him.
Six weeks later, a small parcel came addressed to Alice. Inside it was a tiny carved dog kennel, and a miniature china cocker spaniel. A single line on an otherwise blank sheet of paper wished Alice a belated happy birthday. There was no address.
After some thought, Eleanor and Nathaniel allowed Alice to keep her present.
No letter came for Clio. She would have written to him if she could, she wrote a thousand letters in her head, but she never put one down on paper. She knew that Captain Dennis would rather forget what had happened in the turret room.
Six
Julius fastened the bow of his white tie and spread the butterfly ends between the points of his starched collar. He pulled down his white waistcoat and then shrugged himself into his tailcoat. The coat had once belonged to Nathaniel, who had distinctly broader shoulders, but the length of it at least was approximately right.
Eleanor had told him to take the coat to a tailor, but Julius had answered that he was perfectly happy with it as it was, and he didn’t want to spend time waiting in a fitting room like some débutante.
‘When I make my concert début,’ he told her, ‘then you can kit me out with new evening clothes.’
He inspected himself briefly in the wardrobe mirror, noting the unfamiliarly brilliantined hair and patent leather slippers, and turned away without interest. His violin was lying in its open case on the table and he took it up and ran his finger across the strings. Julius sighed. The prospect ahead of him was less inviting than a concert. He was on his way to Clio’s and Grace’s coming-out dance at Belgrave Square.
Downstairs, at the end of the narrow brown-linoleum hallway, the doorbell rang. Julius laid his violin in its plush nest once more, draped a white silk scarf around his neck and went out, locking the door of his rented rooms behind him
. On the landing he met the woman who lived opposite, a thirtyish redhead who worked at some job with very irregular hours. She raised her eyebrows when she saw him.
‘Well, look at you. Proper dandy.’
Julius blushed. The woman was always too interested in his comings and goings, but she didn’t mind his practising and he didn’t want to antagonize her.
‘It’s my sister’s dance.’ The doorbell rang again, more insistently.
‘Off you go and enjoy yourself, then.’ She watched him as he went down the stairs, admiring his height and the nape of his neck above his starched collar.
Julius’s friend Armstrong was standing on the step, and there were two other music students, Vaughan and Zuckerman, waiting in Zuckerman’s car. Zuckerman gave an impatient hee-haw on the car’s bulb horn when he saw Julius emerge. Julius and Armstrong scrambled into the back seat and they bowled away towards Belgrave Square.
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.