by Rosie Thomas
She rested her forehead in her hand for a moment, wondering if she was unhinged.
Then she gripped the pen and made herself write, ‘My dear Tom’. She heard the bell ring downstairs, and the front door open and close. She had given orders that she was not to be disturbed. My dear Tom. What next, what did people say?
The drawing-room door opened.
Grace looked, and then dropped her pen.
‘Julius.’
He was unshaven and tired. He was carrying a canvas grip in one hand. ‘I’ve come straight from the boat train. I set off as soon as I heard.’
Uncertainly, she stood up. Julius put down his bag and came to her. His arms fitted around her but he was gentle, as if he knew that her bones felt brittle beneath her skin.
She stood quietly with her eyes closed.
Julius was solid, and he was a part of the old, real world, but he did not baffle or frighten her. He was simply there, seeming to fill a small corner of the windy space. She held on to him, her fingers curling in the thick stuff of his travelling clothes.
‘I am so pleased you are here,’ she whispered.
‘I am always here.’
He guided her to a sofa and made her sit down. He held her cold hands, rubbing them between his own. He did not know what he had been expecting to find, had not even allowed himself to imagine what manifestations of grief. He saw now that she was composed. Her hair was drawn tidily back from her white face, and her dark dress was elegant, with a pearl pin at the throat.
Of course, Grace would contain her sorrow. She would not let it spill out, like the viscera of some dismembered hunt quarry after the kill, for all the huntsmen to see. She would have her vulnerable and hidden face, but only Anthony would have seen that.
Julius felt a stab of jealousy, and the persistence of it sickened him.
Grace shivered. ‘Are you cold?’ he asked her. ‘Shall I ring to have the fire made up?’
‘No. Don’t move, I don’t want you to move.’
He went on rubbing her hands, feeling the fine bones move under his fingertips.
‘How are you?’ he asked. He couldn’t think of any way to dress up the threadbare conventionality of the question.
In a small, thin voice she said, ‘It was very sudden, you know. Just a day, really. If I had had more time to make myself ready, I might have been able to bear it better.’ Then she added, ‘But that isn’t true. Nothing would make it easy to bear the death of the person you love most in the world.’
He looked down at her hands, at the diamonds and the plain gold wedding ring.
‘Do you want to talk now?’ he asked gently.
‘Do I? I don’t know. I don’t know anything.’ She was shivering again. Julius got up and went to the tray of drinks on the table between the windows. He poured whisky into a glass and gave it to her. She sipped at it, and he heard the rim of the glass rattling against her teeth.
‘The funeral is tomorrow, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, Julius, the vulgar, meaningless refinement of it all. The order of service. The flowers. The casket. Like some – like some horrible padded box of chocolates, like a tart’s present, to put him in.’
She raised her head and saw Julius’s face. It was softened, blurred with his concern.
‘Couldn’t someone else have dealt with that? Your father? Hugo, or Jake? What have they bloody well been doing, damn them all?’
‘No, I had to deal with it myself.’
But his tenderness and his quick anger had unstopped something inside her, at last. She felt the tears sharp behind her eyes, and then they began to burn on her face, running down her cheeks.
‘Cry. Go on, cry,’ he ordered her.
She did cry, and he held her, and then he refilled her glass and listened while she talked.
Grace talked for a long time. She realized that since Anthony died she had hardly spoken, and now words spilt out with the tears. The happiest memories of Anthony came out mixed up with her horror of the formal arrangements that had to be made after his death. She talked about how much she had loved him, and then her face contorted with anger at him for deserting her. She said that Cressida was angry too, but with her, not her father. ‘She thinks it is my fault.’
‘Poor Grace. Poor Cressida, too.’
She told Julius about her fear of the void she had stepped into, and her feeling of disgust with the irrelevant material world.
‘You are shocked,’ he told her. He was relieved to hear her talking. The iron mask of composure was not so firmly set, at least. ‘Shock is disorientating. Didn’t Jake tell you that?’
‘Yes. Probably. I didn’t hear.’
‘Talk to me some more.’
‘Give me another whisky, then. Isn’t it strange that we should be drinking and talking here, with everything the same, while Anthony is dead?’
‘Yes. But it only looks the same. The truth is that it is all different, because he is dead.’
Grace frowned. The whisky was beginning to affect her. ‘How will I learn that? Sometimes I forget, you know, that it has happened. And then, the pain of remembering it again. Do you know, there probably isn’t any money?’
‘What?’
‘I saw the solicitor and Anthony’s father. Only briefly. They were treading very carefully. Something about the will. It seems Anthony might have transferred funds to New York. After the Hatry crash he must have thought it would be safer to be in American stocks and bonds. I don’t know for sure yet.’ She shrugged at the opulent room. ‘So many things.’
‘Don’t worry about it now.’ Julius had seen enough, in Berlin, of the absence of money. The lack of it seemed inconceivable here in South Audley Street.
‘I’m tired,’ Grace said. ‘But I can’t sleep. Tell me about Berlin.’
‘Such a city. Such a bizarre, startling, diverse place. You must come with me some day.’
‘Perhaps I will.’
Julius knew that she could conceive of nothing beyond her loss, and he did not try to press her.
The whisky decanter was almost empty.
‘What are you going to do?’ he whispered, when she had drained the last of it. He meant, sleep or sit up, but she chose to look further.
‘I don’t know what to do. Find out how to go on living without him, I suppose.’ It was like taking a breath of air without oxygen.
Julius saw her gasp, but he saw something else too, as clearly as if a bright light had flicked on in a pitch-black room. His certainty gave everything a hard-edged, polished clarity.
‘You must stand in his place. You must take Anthony’s seat in Parliament.’
Grace’s sudden laugh broke in her throat. ‘I hadn’t thought of that one.’ She stood up, and staggered a little. ‘You’ll have to help me up to bed, Julius. I’m half drunk.’
He led her upstairs, helped her off with her dress as gently as a lady’s maid, and left her under the covers with her arm protectively crooked over her eyes.
Clio was married two days after Anthony’s funeral.
In the last few days Miles alternated between bouts of morbid depression, in which he claimed repeatedly that he was not good enough for her, and fits of optimism when he promised her the moon and the stars as soon as his book was finished and his fortune was made.
‘I don’t want the moon or the stars,’ Clio said. ‘I just want you.’ She told herself that he was nervous, that they were both shocked by Anthony’s death. She wished that she could be alone to mourn her friend, but she did not want to let Miles out of her sight. Once they were married, she thought, there would be calm enough. There would be time then to console each other.
‘If you want me you shall have me, most precious piglet. Princess of piglets.’
‘Please, Miles.’ She was going to say, ‘No piglets, not now,’ but she caught his eye and the words stopped in her throat. Sometimes he was angry, and the anger alarmed her.
Miles said, ‘Come on, let’s go out. I have
had enough of sitting here, watching you weep.’
Clio knew that he was drinking too much, but she went, because it was better than letting him go alone.
It was a subdued wedding ceremony. They were married as planned at St Pancras registry office, with Jake and Max Erdmann as their witnesses. Clio said ‘I do’ almost inaudibly, and accepted the narrow gold band that Miles gave her. She emerged, blinking in the thin sunlight of a cold November morning, as Mrs Miles Lennox.
Twelve
It was a long time since Clio had last visited Stretton. She was startled by her first sight of it from the window of the station taxi. She had expected that it would seem somehow smaller than it had done to her childish eyes, but when it appeared out of the fold of landscape the great bulk of the house was undiminished. It sat between the bone-white sky and the dun ridges of the park and seemed to play brazen tricks with perspective. It was closer than it looked, or it was a giant’s mansion, or it was two-dimensional and at any moment the canvas it was painted on might ripple in the wind.
The taxi stopped on the sweep in front of the great doors and Clio looked up. There was no trick; the house was solid and as big as she remembered. Dozens of windows blankly reflected the winter light.
She paid the taxi-driver and carried her own suitcase up the steps. It was much colder here than in London. The wind stung her cheeks.
The Strettons’ butler opened one half of the double doors. It was the same butler they had always had, but he looked noticeably bent and feeble now. Long ago he had found Grace and Julius and herself stealing beer from the big barrel in his stillroom to bait a slug-trap, or for some similar childish project that she had forgotten, and he had chased them through the kitchens and out into the dairy yard.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Lennox.’ The name was still new enough to catch her unawares. For a moment she had been a little girl running across the slippery cobbles.
‘Hello, Hodges. How are you?’
‘As well as can be expected, thank you, Mrs Lennox. Lady Grace is with her ladyship in the small drawing room.’
‘I’ll make my own way,’ Clio said quickly.
‘Very good. I will get one of the maids to attend to your luggage.’
Clio knew that she would come to her bedroom and find her skirts and blouses unpacked and hung forlornly behind the doors of some vast armoire. She would hunt for her underwear through a dozen drawers empty except for yellowing newspaper and shreds of lavender that had long ago lost their scent, and find it at last in the least likely corner. There would be a well-laundered linen cover with the Leominster crest worked on it neatly laid on top of the pile. She would fold her under-things in it at the end of the day and they would be discreetly borne away for laundering.
She was thinking as she made her way under the dome that nothing had changed at Stretton. There was the same faint, churchy smell of candlewax and evergreens and damp, and the same ambivalent treatment of daylight. There were so many tall windows, but they were all screened with dusty curtains and holland blinds in case too much sunshine should strike the brocades and gilding of previous generations. At three o’clock in the early December afternoon the high rooms were almost dark.
But by the time she reached the door of the small drawing room Clio had already changed her mind. The house was different, because the cold seemed more intense than usual and the silence less penetrable. When she opened the door and looked into the room she had the feeling that the occupants had withdrawn here, into the last redoubt of warmth and comfort in the entire rambling, deserted pile. It was as if the house were laying siege to its owners.
Blanche and Grace were sitting one on either side of a stone fireplace. A log fire was burning in the iron basket, and one of John Leominster’s springer spaniels was asleep almost on top of the flames. A pair of lamps had been lit, making the room seem cosy in contrast with the view of blue-grey mist and damp-black branches visible through the windows.
Blanche was on her feet at once. ‘Clio, dear child. We never heard the car. What a joy that you are here.’ They hugged each other with mutual pleasure. Clio smelt her familiar scent, old-fashioned white lilac.
At Anthony’s funeral Blanche had looked old and bewildered, but now in her country tweeds with the firelight warming her face she was herself again.
‘Aunt Blanche, you look well.’
Grace had stood up too. She was wearing a navy-blue cardigan jacket and pleated skirt. She was very thin, and the way that the flesh had shrunk over her long nose and hollowed beneath her cheekbones made her no longer pretty. But when she smiled, as she did now, the bones seemed to soften and her face took on a handsomeness that Clio had not seen before.
‘I’m so glad you came,’ Grace said.
‘I don’t know why you wanted me so much. I’ve no idea what I can possibly do,’ Clio protested.
But Grace had begged her to come, and she had not been able to refuse. Now that she was here, she was glad. Stretton enclosed her with a thousand memories. From this vantage point, in the firelight, they seemed all to be happy ones. Julius and Jake, Clio and Grace. Running away from the Babies. Teasing Hugo for being so Culmington.
‘You can keep me company, at least,’ Hugo called.
‘Hugo, are you here?’
Clio hadn’t seen him at first, because he was sitting on a sofa in the shadows beyond the fire. He heaved himself to his feet now, reaching for his stick, and the dog lifted its head to watch him as he hobbled across to kiss his cousin.
‘Not that that will be much of an entertainment. And you only married five minutes ago.’
‘A month now,’ Clio said. And so a little more than a month since Anthony’s death. Each one of them thought it, and knew that the others were thinking the same.
‘Miles can easily spare me,’ she said quickly. ‘He’s come to a difficult point in his work, and some peace and quiet in the flat will be a help.’
She had chosen the moment for telling him very carefully. He had had a good day, and had been buoyant and lively when she came in from work. Not every day was like that, by any means.
They had gone out to the pub together and had two or three drinks, no more. Miles had sat with her hand tucked under his arm, and they surveyed the coming and going at the bar in gossipy good humour. Even so, when she had made her tentative suggestion, he had rounded on her with only a thin veil of pleasantness masking his hostility.
‘Why do you want to go all the way up there? Those people aren’t our people. What do they have to do with us, or you with them?’
‘They are my family,’ Clio said. ‘I want to go because Grace has asked me. I’m glad there is something I can do for her.’
‘Don’t put yourself at her beck and call,’ Miles said coldly.
‘Why not? But it isn’t like that. I’d like to go, Miles, just for a few days. If you don’t need me.’
‘But I do need you. A man needs his little wife.’ He had pouted and looked mock-sulky, and Clio laughed with relief. It would be all right, she could go.
‘A man shall have his little wife. He will appreciate her all the more after a few days of having to fend for himself again.’
‘Nasty shopping and cooking, do you mean?’ He had pretended to recoil in horror. Clio laughed again and kissed his forehead, then went to the bar and bought them both another drink.
The flat had begun to seem rather small now Miles had spread himself and his possessions through the rooms. There were always piles of books and papers everywhere that she was not allowed to touch or tidy. She tried to be as quiet as she could when she came in from Fathom or the Clinic, but it seemed that Miles was distracted by the slightest sound. Being disturbed when he was writing made him angry, and she was the butt of his anger.
A few days in the sombre expanse of Stretton had begun to seem inviting, and it would be good for Miles to have some time for uninterrupted work.
The grand relations, as Miles sneeringly named them, were clearly pleased to see her.
They fussed around her as if she had travelled much further than by train from London, and Clio gave herself up to it with guilty enjoyment.
‘Darling, come and sit by the fire. You look half dead with cold. Is it too early to ring for tea, do you think?’
‘Tea would be heavenly.’
Tea was rung for, and brought in by the butler and a housemaid. Clio had provided herself with a potted meat sandwich for the train, the bread cut from the heel of a stale loaf because she did not want to broach the fresh one left for Miles, and now she was hungry. There were wedges of anchovy toast, and hot muffins in the folds of snowy-white napkins, as well as scones and dark fruit cake laid out on the low table beside her. The tea came in a wide shallow cup, the porcelain so fragile that it was translucent.
Clio sat back in her chair and let the food and the fire warm her. The Stretton family might be under siege in the vast space of their own house, but after Gower Street this was still the height of luxury. Clio had not realized, until this moment, that she was tired of shopping, and cooking, and washing-up. In her single days she might have gone out to a café or skipped meals altogether, but now she felt that Miles must be properly looked after while he worked. It just seemed that it was more difficult to look after two people than one.
‘John is out today,’ Blanche told her, ‘but he will be back for dinner, of course.’
‘Don’t know what kind of a run they’ll be getting. The meet was over at Stinchford,’ Hugo said.
John Leominster had recently sold his hunting box at Melton Mowbray, claiming that he could no longer afford to keep it. Now he had to content himself with the local hunt and with complaining about its inferiority to the Leicestershire packs. Hugo could not ride, and Thomas kept his hunters stabled with his regiment. The stable-yard at Stretton was almost empty.
‘Your father had a good day last time they were over there,’ Blanche said. ‘I remember they killed in old Garnett’s woods.’
Grace rolled her eyes at Clio. ‘Have you seen your room yet?’