Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  The idea of oblivion came to her like a gift.

  As soon as she had assimilated the idea Alice stood up, without allowing herself time to think.

  She unbolted her door and slipped along the corridor to Grace’s bedroom. There was a faint aura of her perfume in here, and the tiny sounds of the house were muffled by thick carpets and heavy curtains. The white quilted satin of the bedcover shimmered in the dim light.

  Alice crossed to the bathroom door. She clicked the string that hung beside it and blinked in the sudden glare of the yellow electric light. This was a place of receding reflections and ranks of glittering glass bottles. There was a mirror with a curved top over the marble washstand, and Alice knew that there was a cupboard let into the wall behind this mirror.

  She touched the latch and the mirror door swung open. Inside there were narrow glass shelves with more bottles and jars ranged neatly upon them. Some of the bottles contained medicine. Alice knew which they were; sometimes she collected prescriptions for Grace from her doctor’s receptionist.

  She found what she was looking for. It was a small brown vial. She pushed it deep into her pocket and closed the door of the cabinet with a final click.

  Down the corridor again in the much smaller and more functional bathroom that she shared with Cressida, Alice filled a toothglass with water. Then she went back into her own bedroom and bolted the door. She tipped the contents of Grace’s medicine vial into the palm of her hand and discarded the empty bottle.

  Alice put out her tongue. She licked up the first of the small white tablets. The taste was powdery and then bitter. She took a mouthful of water and swallowed the pill.

  Soon there was a rhythm. Tongue, bitter taste, sip and swallow.

  In a few moments the hollow of her hand was empty except for a trace of whitish dust.

  The cocktails had made her thirsty. Frowning now, Alice drank the last of the water from the toothglass. She took the photographs down from her shelf and put them on the floor opposite the bed, propped up against the wall so that she could look at them. Then she let herself fall sideways, to lie down on top of the wrinkled bedcover. She drew her knees up to her chest, and eventually closed her eyes.

  Cressida went upstairs at ten o’clock. Grace had been dining elsewhere, and so Cressida had eaten her meal down in the kitchen with Nanny.

  ‘Where’s Miss Alice?’ Nanny had asked over the shepherd’s pie.

  ‘At one of her meetings, I expect,’ Cressida answered, without much thought. Nanny sniffed and took another mouthful.

  On her way up to bed, however, Cressida did begin to think. It was not like Alice to miss a meal. And if she had been invited to some fascist feast or gathering she would have been eager to announce it.

  She went along to Alice’s door and knocked sharply.

  ‘Alice?’

  There was no answer, and she had not expected one. Cressida dropped down on one knee and peered through the keyhole of the solid old door. There was no key in the lock, it must have been lost long ago, Cressida knew that perfectly well. It was not the first time she had spied on Alice.

  She could see the bed, and the black hump of Alice lying curled up on it. She was wearing her stupid uniform.

  ‘Alice?’ Cressida pounded on the door with the flat of her hand.

  ‘Alice, for goodness’ sake.’

  Cressida peered through the little hole again. Alice had not even stirred.

  ‘God,’ she whispered to herself. She straightened up, knowing – without the smallest faltering hope of anything else – that a terrible thing had happened.

  She twisted the handle sharply but the door would not open. She leant against it and pushed, and it still held. Then Cressida stood back, gathered herself, and launched her shoulder with her full weight behind it against the door panel.

  The door was solid enough, but the little bolt that Alice had bought was flimsy. She had impatiently screwed it in place with the socket against the moulded frame, and the screws had never bitten properly into the old wood. The bolt sprang out now and wrenched the socket away with it. Cressida catapulted into the room and caught herself against the bureau. A photograph of Adolf Hitler slithered under her feet and the toe-cap of her school lace-up shoe clinked against something else that had fallen to the floor.

  Cressida bent down beside the bed and shook Alice by the shoulder. Then she bent closer to look at her face.

  Alice’s eyelids were blue, and they seemed to have sunk into her head. Her mouth was open and there were bluish marks around her lips. She was breathing slowly and thickly.

  Cressida’s hand was still gripping her shoulder. The futility of this rough, friendly attempt at awakening struck her at once. Alice’s body felt heavy and solid, but Alice herself within it seemed to be removed, at some great distance. Cressida withdrew her hand, looking down at Alice’s face.

  A refrain started to pulse in her head. Oh, God. Oh, God.

  She found a way to scramble to her feet. There was another photograph there, on the floor, but she didn’t stop to glance at it. She lurched to the door and gripped the frame with one hand.

  ‘Nanny,’ she screamed into the corridor. ‘Nanny, please come. Oh, please, come now.’

  Nathaniel and Eleanor reached the Westminster Hospital in the early hours of the morning. Grace was there, sitting on an uncomfortable chair in a little waiting room, smoking and staring at the shiny tiled walls. A junior nurse had brought her a cup of thick tea with a biscuit laid in the saucer, gazing in awe at Grace’s dress and shoes before scuttling away again.

  ‘Where is she?’ Eleanor demanded. ‘I want to see her.’

  Nathaniel put his hand on her arm.

  Grace’s telephone call had woken them both. They went to bed early nowadays, after the news on the wireless. They had dressed with desperate speed in the big, dark house and had driven straight to London. To Grace her uncle and aunt looked smaller and older than she remembered, with the marks of bewildered anxiety in their faces clear in the over-bright hospital lights.

  ‘She will be quite all right,’ Grace said at once. She had told them as much on the telephone. The doctor had been quite definite about it. ‘There weren’t enough pills left in the bottle to do any real damage.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Eleanor repeated.

  ‘Next door.’

  Alice was lying on her back with her arms stretched out on the white sheet. Her eyes were closed. A middle-aged nurse in a complicated starched cap was sitting with her.

  ‘Professor and Mrs Hirsh?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nathaniel said. Eleanor ran to the side of the bed.

  ‘She is asleep now. I am afraid we had to pump out her stomach. Doctor explained it all to Lady Grace.’

  Eleanor looked up. She was holding one of Alice’s limp hands. ‘I am her mother. I would like to see the doctor, please.’ The young doctor was found. He told them only what they already knew – that the dose had not been large enough to threaten Alice’s life, that she would make a full recovery within a few days.

  ‘Thank you,’ Nathaniel said. ‘That is a great relief.’

  ‘Have you any idea why she might have wanted to take her own life?’ the doctor asked gently.

  Eleanor looked straight into his face. ‘No. We cannot think of any reason at all. Alice is a normal, happy, healthy young woman.’

  ‘I see,’ the doctor said.

  They left Alice under the nurse’s eye and went back to the waiting room. Grace was still sitting, smoking yet another cigarette. Nathaniel put his big hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Thank you for doing what you did, Grace. Your aunt and I are very grateful.’

  Grace suddenly felt very tired. She had been waiting in the airless room for hours. She knew that Alice, the last-born, had always been Nathaniel’s favourite child, and his simple thanks touched her with unexpected force. She looked down at her handbag and gloves, wondering for a moment if she might be going to cry. It would be an inappropriate weakness, she though
t.

  Eleanor turned on them, as Nathaniel stood at Grace’s side. Her face looked bruised with her anxiety, but the concern was overlaid with a harder glaze of suspicion and resentment.

  ‘Why did she do this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Grace answered truthfully. Alice had seemed content enough, between her secretarial duties and her political enthusiasms.

  Eleanor said, ‘She is unhappy. It isn’t natural, I do know that. All these ideas she has learnt.’ From you, they all knew that was what she meant. ‘Anti-Semitic poison, bigotry, racism. It isn’t what we taught her.’

  Grace regarded her steadily, but said nothing. She did not want to embark on a political argument with Aunt Eleanor in a hospital waiting room at five o’clock in the morning.

  ‘It isn’t natural,’ Eleanor repeated. She suddenly sounded helpless, rather than aggressive. Her back had always been straight but now her spine seemed to curve, diminishing her.

  ‘What is natural?’ Grace whispered.

  At once, Eleanor stiffened again. ‘To do what we have brought her up for. To marry some decent man, to have children, to be a wife and mother.’

  And yet none of Eleanor’s daughters had achieved as much. Grace thought fleetingly of Clio, in Paris with Rafael and her illegitimate baby. And of spinsterly Tabby, with her school and church.

  ‘That is not the choice of every woman,’ Grace said. ‘And Alice is an adult, capable of her own decisions. We should be grateful that women’s lives are no longer as circumscribed as they were when my mother and you were young.’

  Eleanor’s mouth made a hard line that was at odds with the tired folds and curves of her face. ‘You may be grateful, but I am not.’

  Nathaniel put his arms around his wife. He held her head against his chest and stroked her hair.

  ‘Alice will be all right,’ he said. ‘You will see. There will be a husband and babies, all in good time.’

  Grace regarded him as he stood holding Eleanor. He was a big, warm man filled with love and affection. But there was also a fatal softness in the core of him, a flaw that had been transmitted to all his children.

  She bent down slowly, with aching limbs, and picked up her bag and gloves. She eased the supple glove leather over her fingers and smoothed it over her wrists.

  ‘I think I will go home now,’ Grace told them. ‘I have a busy day tomorrow. Today, that is. Uncle Nathaniel is right, Aunt Eleanor, you know.’

  ‘I pray as much,’ Eleanor said, without looking at her.

  Cressida had been to bed, and had even slept, but she was up again by the time Grace reached home. She was sitting at the kitchen table in her woollen plaid dressing gown. Her face was pale and there were dark patches under her eyes.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Yes, quite all right,’ Grace sighed. She would have liked China tea, after the brown hospital brew, but it was too much trouble to make it. The sight of Cressida with her unbrushed hair and white cheeks was obscurely irritating.

  ‘Why did she do it?’

  ‘The doctor told me it was a way of saying, “Pay attention to me. Look at me.”’

  ‘Do you think that is true?’

  Grace picked up an orange and began to peel it. Cressida watched how neatly she stripped off the peel and white pith and laid the segments in a crescent on a china plate.

  ‘It could be. Who knows, with Alice? Uncle Nathaniel and Aunt Eleanor are with her now.’

  ‘Will they take her back to Oxford, when she is better?’

  ‘I suppose so. Cressida, why are you sitting there like that? At least brush your hair, couldn’t you?’

  Grace picked up her plate, and a glass of prune juice. She was going upstairs for a hot bath, before the day began. Cressida watched her until the door closed behind her.

  Look at me, listen to me, Cressida thought.

  In the evening, Jake came to the hospital. He found Eleanor close beside Alice’s bed, and Alice herself awake, her hair brushed and coiled to frame her white face. Nathaniel was sitting heavily in the corner of the room with an unopened newspaper beside him. Eleanor and Nathaniel looked expectantly at Jake, as if with his knowledge of bones and blood he could diagnose his sister’s ailment.

  ‘Poor Alice,’ Jake murmured. His helplessness presented itself to him more strongly than usual. He sat down on the high bed and held her wrist to count her pulse, and then angled her chin with his fingers so that he could look into her eyes.

  Alice tried to turn her head aside. She felt the probing of their concern, glaring through her eyelids like a light that was too bright, and longed to be asleep again. The family was closing round her, pressing her up against the wall of her own failure.

  All the time she had been lying in this bed, some of the time pretending to be asleep and for the remainder avoiding her parents’ painful optimism, she had been thinking.

  She could not go back to yesterday, that was impossible. The thought of it made her want to roll away, wadding up the shame and horror inside her.

  But she had no idea which way to go forward. Perhaps, she thought, there never was any going forward. It was quite possible that life just went on and on, as messy and flaccid and unformulated as it was now. One needed the party to give all of it some meaning and after what she had done, how could there be any more party?

  Yet Alice was sure of one thing. She had not wanted to die, she had only wanted to live differently. It was a relief to find herself alive, even in this little room. Even with Eleanor and Nathaniel bravely not admitting their sorrow and Jake with his doctorly bluff bedside behaviour. The family closed its ranks around her, protecting and containing, as it had always done. And still she was glad to be here.

  She turned and met Jake’s scrutiny full in the face, with her old defiance.

  ‘Why did you take the pills?’

  The temptation to tell him, barefaced, rippled through her. It was so unthinkable that she almost laughed, and then felt uneasy with the spectacle of her own amusement.

  ‘You must know why, Alice,’ Jake persisted. Nathaniel and Eleanor watched and waited.

  ‘I felt unhappy,’ she said at last. ‘I’m sorry. I’m better now.’

  It was all she had said, and all she would say.

  ‘Poor Alice,’ he repeated. She noticed that there were creases in his cheeks that his full beard no longer hid. Jake would soon be forty. No longer a young man to whom anything might happen. Vaguely, she wondered what were the satisfactions that gave Jake his apparent endurance.

  ‘She will be quite all right,’ he was saying to Eleanor, just as the hospital doctor had done. ‘Rest is what she needs. Rest and a complete change of scene.’

  ‘She must come back home, of course,’ Eleanor said. ‘I can look after her there and she will be away, away from …’ Her voice trailed off but they knew she meant away from Grace.

  Alice’s expression did not change.

  ‘Would you like that?’ Jake asked her gently.

  ‘To be like Tabby?’ Alice asked.

  There was a little silence. Nathaniel eased his bulk forward in his chair. His big hands hung between his knees.

  ‘Come for a little while. Keep your old father company through the Long Vac.’

  The note he struck was wrong, they all heard it. He spoke to her as if she was the adored child, and not white-faced grown-up Alice in her hospital bed.

  ‘I think I am too old to come home,’ she answered flatly.

  The pressure of their concern was in one way almost intolerable. She longed for them to go away, so that she could close her eyes again. But yet her effect on them gave her some sense of power to be used when she had so little strength elsewhere.

  Now was the chance, she thought suddenly. Now was the time to seize an opportunity, whilst they were ready to concede to her. If only she could think of any concession that might be worth the winning.

  ‘I would like to go away somewhere,’ she announced.

  Their faces brightened wi
th the hope of it.

  ‘To see Julius, perhaps. Would he have me for a houseguest, d’you think?’

  To Berlin.

  No.

  Eleanor snatched at her hand.

  ‘You cannot go to Berlin. It is far too dangerous. I only wish that Julius would have the sense to come home.’

  Alice, why do you want to hurt us?

  They were frightened of Nazism, which was so strong and simple and obvious. Alice lay against her pillows as the protests and reasonings and love washed up against her. She felt cut off from them now, family and feelings, within the walls of her own self-interest.

  ‘To Clio then, in Paris.’

  No.

  But the reasons were different now, and the protests only came from Eleanor.

  Clio was living with a man who was not her husband, and an illegitimate baby; living on little money and what they could scrape from hand-to-mouth jobs; Clio had set herself apart from their world.

  ‘But Clio is very happy.’

  It was Jake who said it.

  Clio wrote to them all very often, long and affectionate letters that described the apartment in the Marais that she had taken with Rafael and Romy, her writing and the peculiar jobs that she and Rafael took on when money was short, the friends they had made and the city she had grown to love. There were photographs of the tow-haired baby girl, and of Rafael in the park at Versailles, and of herself with a new, shorter hairstyle. These pictures had taken their place, without comment being made, in the family photograph albums.

  But Clio had never come home again, and the letters that Eleanor wrote in acknowledgement were short and formal.

  ‘Don’t you think that happiness is a good influence?’ Jake persisted.

  Eleanor bent her head.

  ‘I think we should let Alice go to Paris to have a holiday with her sister, if that is what she wants,’ Nathaniel said.

  When Eleanor would not look at him he picked her hand off the laundered-thin hospital bedcover and held it between his own. He thought of all the times he had done this, and the progress of the years, and the baby that Alice had once been.

  ‘She can see our granddaughter for us,’ he said.

  Eleanor had begun to cry. She would not raise her head but she answered, ‘If you say Alice may go, who am I to say that she may not?’