by Rosie Thomas
‘God believes in you,’ Tabby murmured, before bicycling away to one of her bible classes.
Remembering this, Cressida made a small impatient noise and came in from the balcony. Her gloomy survey of the garden had made her feel cold, and she was wondering if, after all, it might not have been a better choice to go up to her grandmother at Stretton. Only since Grandpa Leominster had died Grandma seemed content to sit in her little drawing room and read an endless supply of novels with her husband’s dogs snoring at her feet, and Cressida never knew what to say to her uncle Hugo. The house in the Woodstock Road had always seemed such a fountain of liveliness and warmth in comparison with Stretton. Only now, without Nathaniel and Clio, all the light had gone.
Cressida wondered where Alice was, and what she might be having to endure at this moment. She remembered how she had looked through the keyhole and seen her hunched, motionless shape on the bed.
Shivering a little, Cressida closed the French doors. The drawing room overlooking the garden held the same muddle of books, manuscripts and sheet music spilling over the unpolished furniture as it always had done. She stepped over the rippled oriental rugs and took her book off the piano where she had left it. She was settling down to read with her knees drawn up as a bookrest, when she heard the front doorbell ring.
From somewhere in the house she heard Aunt Eleanor materializing on her way to answer it. Her heels clicked across the coloured stars and diamonds of the Victorian tiles in the hallway. Immediately there was a murmur of voices. Cressida could distinguish a man’s low rumble.
A moment later the drawing-room door opened. There was indeed a man, but it was no one Cressida recognized. He had wiry grey hair, worn long and flowing over his ears. He had a beard too, less luxuriant that Nathaniel’s, with yellowish tufts at the corners of his mouth. He was dressed in some kind of long dark cape, and he carried a large hat with a curled brim.
Cressida folded away her book and stood up politely, ready to be introduced to her aunt’s guest.
‘This is my great-niece, Cressida Brock,’ Eleanor said. ‘And Cressida, this is Mr Pilgrim. The painter, you know.’
‘How do you do?’ Cressida said.
The man swept forward and seemed to loom over her. He had sharp eyes under heavy lids and his clothes carried the smell that she had sometimes noticed in summertime when the doors of public houses were left open on to the pavement.
‘Cressida Brock,’ he said, with a long, drawn-out theatrical inflection. ‘As lovely as her mama ever was.’ He took her hand and lifted it to his whiskery beard.
‘Mr Pilgrim is a friend of your Aunt Clio, and of your mother too. The portrait is his work.’
Cressida glanced up at The Janus Face.
‘What do you think of it?’ Pilgrim asked, looking at her intently.
Cressida was used to the violence of the straining limbs and staring eyes, and the lascivious attention given to the naked skin and coiling masses of multi-coloured hair. She also knew that the artist had an international reputation and that the picture was now worth an enormous amount of money. It was a kind of joke in the Hirsh household that it was more valuable than the Stretton Sargent and was still left to hang in its old place, on permanent loan from the artist. But she did not much like it as a portrait of her mother and aunt.
‘I think it is admirable,’ she said carefully.
The painter gave a surprising hoot of laughter. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘That’s my girl.’
Then he turned his attention back to Eleanor. He had called unexpectedly, hoping to find Nathaniel and an early glass or two of beer. Instead here was Eleanor wringing her hands over some disaster that had befallen her youngest child in Berlin, and the utterly unexpected apparition of Grace’s daughter. The child was practically grown-up. In his imagination she was still a dough-faced infant.
‘Eleanor, you must go back to your letters. I have no intention of interrupting your afternoon. I don’t need tea, or any attention at all.’ Then he smiled. ‘Perhaps Cressida will keep me company for half an hour.’
Eleanor looked doubtful. Then Pilgrim twirled round as if he had just had a wonderful idea. ‘Perhaps I could draw her. I would like to so much. The family resemblance, you know.’
Eleanor’s face cleared as her vague anxieties about chaperonage drifted away. Clio and Grace had been left to sit for Pilgrim, after all, long ago.
‘Well, I suppose. If Cressida would like it …’
Pilgrim had already produced a flat tin of charcoal sticks from one of his pockets. He was prowling about the room squinting at the light and turning over manuscript sheets in search of a suitable piece of paper.
‘I don’t mind,’ Cressida said.
When Eleanor had gone, Pilgrim sat back to look at the child. He had placed her on the piano stool with her face half turned to the light from the tall windows.
He was enchanted. His daughter was a beauty.
Grace had been fiercely protective over the years. Pilgrim had seen Cressida just once, when she was a baby.
He remembered exclaiming, ‘Why is the young of the human species so extravagantly ugly?’
After that it had been made clear that he was no longer a friend of the Brocks. He had never visited their house after that one time, and on the rare occasions when the separate threads of their London lives had crossed Grace had ignored him as far as possible. Pilgrim had not minded particularly. His paternal instincts were not highly developed, and it had never worried him that Anthony Brock had died with his belief intact that Cressida was his own.
But now that he saw Cressida, he felt differently. She was, he calculated, just over sixteen years old. She had a solemn, narrow face with pronounced cheekbones and wide-set eyes. The irises were so dark that they looked plum-coloured. She looked like her mother, except for her hands and some of the movements she made. These spoke eloquently to Pilgrim of himself.
‘Is this all right?’ Cressida asked, nervously gesturing with those broad hands. She found that she was disconcerted by the man’s scrutiny.
‘Just relax. Find a comfortable position and then hold it,’ he said briskly, as if she were any other model.
Cressida squared her shoulders. At least she was thin now, she thought. She had willed herself into slimness two years ago, and even now she still ate as little as she could despite the constant gnawing of hunger. She was pleased with the results of her will-power now. It felt glamorous and adult to be sitting for a famous painter. It was the kind of thing that her mother did.
Pilgrim began to draw. He made strong, black strokes on the blank paper.
‘Tell me what has happened to – Alice, is it? In Berlin?’
Cressida told him, and he listened with sympathy.
‘And so your mother sent you to Oxford, while she is away?’
‘Yes. For Aunt Eleanor to look after me. And for me to keep Aunt Eleanor company.’
‘An excellent arrangement,’ Pilgrim said. ‘You can keep me company too. I have to be in Oxford for a few days, so perhaps I may call in the afternoons, and you can sit for me?’
‘I would like that,’ Cressida said truthfully. The prospect of a visitor of her own, and an important one who was making a drawing of her, was much more interesting than a series of empty afternoons. And she was intrigued by this Pilgrim. He was odd to look at but she liked the way he talked, and the way he stared at her as if he wanted to see inside her head. She didn’t think that anyone had ever paid her such close attention before.
‘Go on talking,’ Pilgrim ordered.
Cressida did as she was told. She talked about Vincent Street, and about Grace’s work, and about Alice and the Blackshirts, and about herself.
Later, when Pilgrim had drawn enough, with Eleanor’s permission they went for a walk in the University Parks. The sharp November air drew colour into Cressida’s cheeks and Pilgrim watched her with deepening fascination as she talked. Once she had properly begun, and discovered the luxury of an attentive audience, the words seemed
to spill out of her. Cressida was clever, and the long hours she had spent alone had given her an original turn of mind. She had opinions on surprising topics, from politics to Darwinism, and she seemed to have read a great many books.
Pilgrim listened to everything she said with admiration and the beginnings of pride.
When he escorted her back to the Woodstock Road, he promised that he would call again the next afternoon. He came exactly as he had promised, and spent another hour working on his drawing. Afterwards they walked again, along the banks of the Cherwell under the lachrymose branches of the willow trees.
There was another day, and the day after that. The little charcoal drawing was nearly complete, even though Pilgrim worked as slowly as he could. Cressida opened like a flower under the warmth of his attention and approval.
‘Are we friends?’ she asked once, turning to look at him and at the same time childishly skipping backwards so as not to break the rhythm of their walk.
He made her stop, and took her hands. ‘Of course,’ he answered, with what struck her as unusual seriousness. ‘More than friends.’
Cressida waited, but he did not elaborate.
In Berlin, Grace was granted another audience with the Führer.
She was escorted through the same corridors of the Reichskanzlerai, but this time to a huge office with a great polished desk set under the red folds of crossed Nazi flags. Stormtroopers stood stiffly to attention beside the doors and between the windows. But the Führer himself stood up courteously when she was shown in, and even came round his desk to shake her hand.
Grace took the chair that he indicated, folding her hands in her lap to hide their shaking. He waited, with one eyebrow raised, polite but cold. For all the formal display of civility she was not here as a friend now, she realized. Not like last time. The thought of the long corridors at her back, closely guarded and separating her from the light and air, made her shiver as if she was sick. Renewed fear for Alice gripped her at the same instant.
She began to apologize for whatever it was that Alice had done. Alice was young, a stranger to Germany, inexperienced. She had meant no harm, to the Führer or to anyone else. If she could be released, her imprisonment up until now a sufficient punishment for her foolishness, her family was waiting for her in Berlin. They would take her home at once.
Hitler inclined his head. It was a small matter. A triviality, as far as he was personally concerned. But there were formalities to be observed, and the details were not in his own hands. To emphasize his point he spread his manicured fingers in front of her.
Lady Grace must rest assured that everything necessary would be done to secure her young cousin’s early release, and the conclusion of this unfortunate matter.
That was all.
A moment later Grace was outside the heavy doors, steered by the stormtroopers towards the daylight.
Nathaniel and Julius and Rafael were waiting for her.
‘I don’t know,’ Grace blurted out. ‘He was polite, he said everything would be done that could be done, and that we must just wait.’
There was nothing else she could offer them, when they had clearly hoped for much more. She had half convinced herself, when the summons came, that Alice would be conjured up from wherever she was being held so that Grace could carry her home in triumph. She had a colder vision now.
‘It was magnificent that you saw him at all,’ Nathaniel said, but he was unable to hide his heaviness. It was Julius who came to her and felt her shaking. He guided her to a chair and sat holding her in his arms until the spasm had passed.
‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘You are here with me now.’
Rafael and Nathaniel left them. Nathaniel was spending hours of his time at the Embassy, pleading their case with whichever diplomat was available, and Rafael was busy with the legal needs of the shattered families who had belonged to his own circle, and with what remained of his Jewish resistance group. Grace let her head fall against Julius’s shoulder. She could have wept for crumbling ideals and for her own distorted visions, but she would not let herself.
Julius tilted her chin in his fingers and then outlined the shape of her mouth with one fingertip.
Grace recognized the happiness in his eyes. Julius’s old, hesitant manner had gone. He was confident now. At last, after so many years, it was appropriate to acknowledge the feelings he had disguised for so long. It made her look at him quite differently; she read a hundred things in him, as well as the happiness, that she had never seen before. There was something new in herself too. It was inconceivable that they should be happy here and now, but there was the fact of it.
In those hours after they had lain down on Grace’s bed in the Adlon Hotel, it was as if they were following the steps of some intricate and glorious dance. They both knew what the final measure of the dance would be, and they let themselves be swept towards it on the imperious beat of the music.
Pilgrim laid down his charcoal stick and blew the last faint traces of dust from the drawing. ‘There,’ he said.
Cressida slipped off the piano stool and came round to look at it. She leant over his shoulder, resting her chin for an instant on the musty corduroy of his coat. Pilgrim resisted the impulse to pull her closer to him, to hold on to her. He was not used to resisting his own impulses.
‘It’s finished,’ Cressida said sadly. She gazed at the picture. He had elongated her arms and legs and fingers so that she looked like some timid animal, a gazelle perhaps, ready to take flight. But the face was her own.
‘You have made me prettier than I really am,’ she accused him.
‘That is the accepted procedure in portraiture of a certain kind. But you are wrong, in fact. If anything, the picture is less than flattering.’
Cressida blushed, he was charmed to see.
‘I suppose you have to go back to London.’
‘Yes,’ Pilgrim said, because he did.
‘Shall we have a last walk?’
‘Of course.’
They went out into the Parks again. It was a cold day, colourless, with a sharp wind whipping the trees. Cressida strode along in her belted mackintosh with her hair blown back from her face. This sidelong view of her reminded him of Grace, and of the Janus portrait. It was a good piece of work, Pilgrim thought, with satisfaction. Better now and better in a hundred years’ time than the milk-and-water Sargent it had been intended to complement.
‘You are very like Grace,’ Pilgrim said.
‘In looks, perhaps. But more like my father inside, I believe.’
‘Talk to me about Anthony.’ With masochistic fascination, Pilgrim wanted to hear about it from the child’s own lips.
Cressida said simply. ‘The day my father died was the worst I will ever know. They put a black mask on his face to help him breathe, but I thought they were trying to suffocate him. His face was so white. I wanted to see him, but the nurses and Mummy sent me away. He died that night. I never said goodbye to him.’
Pilgrim tucked her cold hand under his arm, but they went on walking.
‘He was a wonderful father. He always seemed to be there, when Mummy was away. He made up games and stories. There was a game we used to play in his study, desert explorers, using a rug to make a tent.’
It sounded a banal enough relationship, Pilgrim thought. No doubt most fathers were capable of stories and games. He could probably have performed in the same way himself.
‘I miss him still, every day,’ Cressida said softly. ‘I still love him.’
He was pierced by her devotion then. The pain of it made him want to bend himself double. It felt just as though an arrow were passing through all his accumulated layers of self-interest and self-protectiveness.
Pilgrim had imagined that he was invulnerable, but he was not. If only Grace and he had been different, he was thinking, he might have been able to claim this innocent affection of Cressida’s for himself. It would be his, and not poor Anthony Brock’s.
He was suddenly bu
rning with jealousy for Cressida’s love for her father. And he was angry with Grace for having kept this remarkable child to herself. He felt that he had been fenced out of her young life, like some marauding animal that must be kept beyond the pale of the village settlement. He held on to her arm, feeling the suppleness of her thin wrist, wanting to hold her and keep her as he had never wanted to keep an ordinary woman.
‘I used to be afraid of my mother. She always seemed to be so beautiful and busy and clever. And also … enamelled, difficult to penetrate. She was very good at making me feel that I wasn’t quite what she hoped for. She still is, as a matter of fact, but I don’t mind that so much any more. At least I am thin now. When I was small she used to dress me in pretty, babyish clothes that showed off the rolls of fat. Did she do it deliberately, do you think?’
Cressida was smiling. She had grown vivacious in the warmth of Pilgrim’s attention.
Pilgrim said, ‘Your mother is an uncommon creature. You should love her, and admire her too.’
They reached the river. It was running high, and crusts of foam rode on the back of it.
‘I loved my father best,’ Cressida said.
Capricious jealousy rose up within him, swirling to the surface of all his other feelings like the river foam. Pilgrim opened his mouth. Coldly and flatly he told her, ‘Anthony Brock is not your father. I am.’
Cressida did not speak for a long moment. Slowly and stiffly she detached her hand from his arm. She rubbed her elbow briefly with her white fingers, as if it had been bruised.
Afterwards she remembered the colour of the water, and the fronds of willow branch that seemed to reach out to nip at her hair.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.
Her denial was so complete and so vehement that there seemed to be nothing that either of them could add. They walked on in silence.
Only inside Cressida’s head there was a tumult of noise. It was impossible. The notion was obscene, and horrible. She tried to cling on to the belief that it was impossible, but another much more unpleasant voice asserted that it was not impossible at all. And if it were not the truth, how or why should Pilgrim have suggested such a thing? She thought of the portrait, and the expanses of flesh and waving, wild hair suddenly seemed threatening and significant and nauseatingly erotic. The limbs became her mother’s and this man’s, coupling. Was she the result of that coupling? Cressida saw her father’s face under the black mask, and she remembered the nurses who to her childish eyes had looked like birds of prey.