Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  Lady Astor had done as she asked, and placed her next to the German Ambassador.

  Alice had gone up to her bedroom, but she was not yet in bed. She was sitting cross-legged on her counterpane, looking at her pictures and mementoes. Her wiry hair was loose over the shoulders of the pyjamas she always wore, striped blue and white ones, like a boy’s. Without her face-powder and hairpins she looked much younger than her age.

  There were two pictures. One was a photograph of Oswald Mosley, wearing a black high-necked jersey with a row of medals pinned to his chest. It was signed ‘To Alice, from your friend and fellow-campaigner’. The other photograph was of Adolf Hitler. Neatly laid out beside the photographs were Alice’s party badge, presented to her one miraculous evening downstairs in Grace’s drawing room by the Leader himself, and a swastika armband, a whistle and a pair of black leather gauntlets. These were the finishing touches to Alice’s homemade Blackshirt regalia.

  There was also a folded newspaper clipping, weighted with a small pebble. Alice moved the stone and unfolded the paper, careful not to touch the fragile crease. The newspaper picture showed a group of the boys, and herself, standing a little to one side, in her black beret.

  Most of the time Alice thought most of the boys were stupid and vulgar, with their loud voices and bad accents, but on that evening they had been almost brothers. They had been handing out leaflets about Jewish crimes, and the crowd in Piccadilly Circus had suddenly swollen and begun to heave and murmur around them. There had been abusive shouts, and a stone had clattered against a lamppost. More stones had followed the first, and Alice and the others had picked them up and hurled them back again.

  They had stood their ground in the shouting and stone-throwing until the police arrived to disperse them. And even then they had marched away, with their arms linked, singing as loudly as they could. It was as if they had won a battle.

  Alice was proud of the memory. She had kept one of the stones and made it part of her shrine.

  She swung her legs off the bed now. She looked at the door, to make sure that it was securely bolted. She had bought the bolt herself, and screwed it in place. It was unbearable to think of Cressida looking in here, perhaps catching sight of one of her rituals.

  Alice picked up her photographs and kissed each one in turn. Then she replaced them, in exactly the right position, and lifted her arm in the salute. At last she knelt down on the hooked rug beside her bed and clasped her hands. She kept her eyes fixed on the pictures.

  ‘Here I am. Here I am.’

  She whispered the words over and over again. They were her self-dedication, and she offered herself up more fervently than she had ever prayed to any other God. Alice wanted nothing more than to be noticed, and to be allowed to contribute to the Cause whatever it was she might be capable of. And in all the flowing vigour of her youth and strength Alice believed that she was capable of the greatest things.

  After a week in London, Clio went home to Oxford, to the Woodstock Road, because she couldn’t wish herself on Jake and Ruth any longer.

  Nathaniel was preparing for the new academic year. There were reading lists and sheaves of papers heaped on the desk in his study, and he set off briskly for College every morning with his bag bulging under his arm. In the evenings there were often colleagues or graduate students arguing in the drawing room overlooking the big garden, while Eleanor sat in the lamplight with her head bent over her sewing. Meals appeared as haphazardly as they had ever done, and the housemaids were always on the point of giving notice. Music from Nathaniel’s gramophone boomed up the stairs, in place of Julius’s practising, and there was the same family jumble of hats and umbrellas and galoshes rising in the hallway.

  To Clio the house was much as it had always been, only emptier and quieter. The emptiness seemed to make the house even bigger, and to throw its shabbiness into sharper relief. Dust lay thickly on the oak treads of the staircase, and there were balls of fluff on the old Turkey rugs in the drawing room.

  Tabitha was the only one of the children still left at home. At twenty-three she seemed to have settled into an immutable routine that might well continue until she was sixty-three. She taught an infants’ class at a Church school in Summertown, and on Sundays she went to services at a great red church with a pointed spire in Jericho, where she also led a Bible study group. Tabby had always been religious, even as a small girl, but now her Christianity had become the central point in her life. Clio watched her, and listened to what she said, even though Tabby was no more talkative than she had ever been, and understood that her sister was fulfilled by the work she did, and was also happy. Happier than any of the rest of us, Jake or Julius or Alice or me, Clio thought.

  Lying on her bed in her old room at the top of the house, Clio began to feel as if she were twelve again. The creaks and whispers of the house were so familiar, even the faint squeaks of the bedsprings when she turned her head. She slept, descending unpredictably into unconsciousness, and dreamed of her childhood. When she woke up, in confusion, she thought she had dreamed of having been a woman. Sometimes, she had to run the tips of her fingers over her body, with its different softened contours, to convince herself that she was grown up, no longer dressed in her school serge tunic.

  Only this involuntary retreat into childhood did not offer any illusion of security. Rather it made her feel less able to confront the adult fears that were crowding in on her.

  She telephoned Julius in Berlin. She could hear the taut shiver of concern, like a bowstring, in his voice. There was no news to tell her, good or bad. He and Grete had heard nothing. Clio telephoned Grace, too.

  ‘I’ve done all I can,’ Grace said. ‘I made a very strong representation, as directly as I could. To the Ambassador, as it happens. I also wrote to the Führer. Clio, I’ve stepped a long way beyond what protocol allows.’

  Clio was impressed, and grateful, in spite of herself, but Grace cut short her thanks.

  ‘Wait and see if there are any results.’

  Clio waited.

  She read a good deal, and walked in the University Parks. The trees were turning, in a prodigal display of red and gold, but the flame colours seemed to leap into the air above the branches, making her think of the burning Reichstag. She felt very tired, as if her bones weighed too heavily within her.

  If Nathaniel and Eleanor were anxious for her, they didn’t show it. Clio had explained to them, as matter-of-factly as she could, that she and Miles had decided to live apart because they no longer made one another happy. Nathaniel, ever liberal-minded, nodded sadly.

  ‘I’m sorry, Clio. Marriages should be made to last. But if this is the path you have to take, then your mother and I will accept it, of course. And your home is here, for as long as you need it. Miles is still in Berlin, is he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Eleanor said, after Nathaniel had gone back to his desk, ‘Perhaps it would have been different if you had had children, the two of you.’

  ‘It is much better that we didn’t,’ Clio answered.

  She also told them that a Jewish friend of Julius’s had been arrested by the Nazis and that they were all fearful for him. Nathaniel read the reports of Hitler’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and the Geneva Disarmament Conference with her, and the Nazi threat to Germany and to Europe became an even more fiercely argued subject around Eleanor’s dinner table.

  That was all. Nathaniel and Eleanor seemed detached and serene within their own world. It came to Clio that her parents had tended and nourished their children, had done for them all that they were capable of, and that now they were releasing them, for better or worse. Her mother and father were getting old, and the next generation were preparing themselves to take their places. She felt a small but distinct twist of apprehension in her belly.

  In those autumn days Nathaniel was preoccupied with his work and with University affairs. Eleanor went to Stretton for a few days, to keep Blanche company. John Leominster had been ill, with a series of chest in
fections that obstinately refused to clear, but when Eleanor came home to Oxford again she reported that he seemed to be on the mend.

  ‘Poor Blanche. John is a terrible patient,’ she said.

  At last, at the end of October, Clio went up to London. She had made an appointment to see one of the doctors from the Mothers’ Clinic – but privately, in his own consulting room.

  The test took only a few minutes, and the examination afterwards was briskly done.

  ‘Feeling sick, are you? More tired than usual? Breasts tender?’ the doctor asked cheerfully as he probed inside her. Clio resisted the impulse to wrench herself away and to curl up with her knees drawn against her chest.

  The doctor withdrew his fingers and snapped off his surgical gloves. ‘I can’t think what else it might be, in a healthy young woman like you. But call my nurse the day after tomorrow, and she’ll confirm the good news for you.’

  Clio took the train home from Paddington. There was no need to wait for the results of the test, she knew by now that she was pregnant. But she did telephone, at the appropriate time, slipping into Nathaniel’s study when he was in College and Eleanor was resting. The test was positive.

  ‘Between two and three months, Doctor says,’ the woman chirped. And she added, ‘Congratulations.’

  Ten weeks, or thereabouts. Clio spread her fingers over her stomach, trying to visualize the shrimp of a foetus within her.

  Rafael’s baby.

  She knew when he had been conceived. It had been on one of the nights in the inn, up in the Thüringer Wald, amongst the great forest trees. She had hoped for it then, with a kind of secret, gluttonous delight. The hope had given their love-making a fluid, interlocking intensity. Then, in the horrible aftermath of Rafael’s disappearance, it had seemed too much to expect that she might after all be left with something of him.

  And now, with the brisk doctor’s confirmation of her pregnancy, Clio felt divided. There was her own body, hard and soft and perfectly familiar, and there was the baby’s, undiscovered, nested inside it. There was her happiness at having this much of Rafael, and her fears of solitude, of having to mother this baby alone, and the fact of its illegitimacy cutting her off from the tidy, arranged and moral world she had always lived in.

  For a week, ten days, two weeks, Clio did nothing. She swung giddily between delight and despair. She made elaborate plans for herself and the baby, and then she discarded them. When she lay on her narrow bed and pressed her hands over her belly she thought she could feel the growing roundness of it.

  In the middle of November, the letter arrived. It came one afternoon, in a blue envelope addressed to her in handwriting that she recognized as Grete’s, and postmarked Berlin.

  Clio tore it open with shaking fingers.

  There was a sheet of paper inside, and when she unfolded it a second sheet fell out. It was a letter from Rafael.

  He was in the Oranienburg camp, not far from Berlin. He had been in different places, but he believed that this was where he would stay.

  It was difficult, he wrote, but not as bad as it had been. He had been moved to a different section and there was more food now. And he had been allowed to write this. He was hopeful, and she must be hopeful too. I love you were the last words of the brief letter.

  He was alive.

  She read it again, and a third time. There was no mistake.

  Clio gripped the paper so hard that her knuckles whitened as she tried to read the words between the lines. He would not have been allowed to write whatever he wanted. The careful message was too guarded. But she understood enough. It was difficult, but not as bad as it had been. There was more food. He had been allowed to write to his friends. He was hopeful. I love you.

  A thrill of relief passed through her. She was trembling, and her breath caught in her chest. It was a moment before she remembered to look at the other sheet of paper and see what Grete had written.

  ‘I send you this wonderful news,’ she said. ‘It was delivered to me one hour ago. Now we know, and we can hope and pray for him.’

  Clio whirled around. She was smiling, a brilliant smile that ironed the anxiety out of her face. This house was too quiet, much too sombre. The November afternoon was already growing dark. She must share the wonderful news now, immediately.

  Nathaniel was teaching. The smooth faces of three undergraduates turned to gaze at her when she burst into his study. She was interrupting their mild pursuit of vowel shifts.

  ‘He’s safe, Pappy. He’s in Oranienburg, but he’s alive and well. I’ve had a letter. Excuse me,’ she murmured belatedly to the three boys. She realized that they must be staring at her euphoric smile.

  Nathaniel reached up to pat her hand.

  ‘This is your friend Rafael? I’m very glad, my love. This is good news.’

  ‘The best news there ever was. Excuse me, again.’ One of the boys was grinning behind his hand at the apparition of the madwoman.

  Eleanor was in the kitchen and Clio ran down to find her. Clio stood by the old scrubbed table, resting the fingertips of one hand on the smooth wood. Eleanor saw that her eyes were sparkling and she held the splayed fingers of the other hand over the invisible dome of her stomach. She looked away, and then back to her daughter’s face as Clio spilt out the story.

  ‘It’s good that he is alive,’ Eleanor said, although her mouth felt stiff. She wondered, now that she had seen it, how she could have overlooked for so long the obvious truth that Clio was in love. She had been making pastry and she shifted the floury lump in her hands, and then made a sudden, vicious kneading movement. The dough yielded under her fingers, but the new weight of her anxiety did not move.

  ‘Everything will be all right now,’ Clio promised her, but Eleanor couldn’t find any answer. Caught in the current of her own happiness, Clio didn’t even notice as much.

  Clio telephoned Grace again. This time Grace could hear the relief, singing in her voice.

  ‘It must have been your doing, Grace. Thank you. It sounds so flat, doesn’t it, just thank you? But I truly mean it.’

  ‘He isn’t safe yet.’

  ‘I know. But to be sure he is still alive, can you understand what that it is like?’

  There was a pause. In the humming distance between them was the memory of Anthony, and all the nodes and connections of the years before and after his death, radiating outwards, a web enmeshing them both.

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said softly.

  Clio was thinking of the portrait hanging in its place in the next room. Two faces forever looking in opposite directions, but the figures seeming to sprout from the same root. The web of associations was thickening, supporting her as well as constraining the two of them. It had been at the party to celebrate The Janus Face hanging that Grace had confided her secret to the magic circle. If she was going to confide her own secret, fourteen years later, to whom could she tell it but Grace?

  ‘I am going to have Rafael’s baby,’ Clio said.

  The silence, again. When Grace did speak it was in a carefully neutral voice, with all the reactions excluded from it.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Grace had come to Jake, all those years ago, asking if he could find someone to help her. ‘I’m going to have the baby. I want it more than anything in the world.’

  ‘Well, Miles was in Berlin, wasn’t he? Surprisingly accommodating of him.’

  Grace meant that she could claim the baby to be her husband’s. Grace had married Anthony Brock, who loved her, just to save her reputation.

  ‘No.’

  If Clio had been unsure before, the certainty emerged now, as clear as the air of Waltersroda.

  ‘No. I won’t pass the baby off as Miles’s. I want everyone to know it is Rafael’s. I’m not ashamed of him, or of our child, why should I be?’

  ‘Clio, think.’ There was colour in Grace’s voice now.

  ‘I have thought. I want Rafael’s baby.’ He is not Pilgrim’s, conceived out of ignoran
ce or carelessness and then covered over. Poor Anthony, poor Cressida. Such a long-held, shabby secret. But mine is a baby conceived in love, to be born in hope. ‘I want him to be acknowledged as his father’s son.’

  ‘And so. What do you think Eleanor and Nathaniel will say? What kind of life will you have with an illegitimate child? Cut off from your own people? And what if your man doesn’t come back again?’

  Clio was smiling. To have her doubts removed was like being relieved of toothache after weeks of pain. ‘He will come back. The baby and I will have each other. I can make a life anywhere.’ Times had changed. She was a grown woman, not a frightened girl. She could control her own destiny.

  The sweeping grandeur of the vision heartened her.

  Grace sighed. Clio sounded like a religious convert. There was the same blind, bell-like conviction in her voice.

  ‘I can’t dissuade you, then. But I do warn you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Clio said.

  The web of memory and association held Grace as tightly in its filaments. Clio had kept her secret. Anthony had never known, and Grace felt gratitude for that every day, every time she looked at Cressida. She sat at her tidy desk now, with the picture of her husband in its silver frame beside her hand, and the silent question repeated itself in her head. Why did you die? Why did you leave me?

  ‘Grace? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. Listen. I’ll try the Ambassador again for you, ask some more questions. Now we know where he is, it will be easier to petition for his release. Can you be patient?

  The letter was lying in Clio’s lap. She knew it by heart now, and the loops and slashes that made up every word.

  ‘Yes. You are more generous that I deserve, Grace.’

  ‘Oh, who knows what any of us really deserves?’

  As Clio went to bed that night she resolved that tomorrow she would tell Eleanor and Nathaniel the truth.