by Rosie Thomas
It was an odd sentiment to overtake a half-Jewish and wholly sceptical outcast from this very world, Clio reflected. But she was moved, and there were tears in her eyes as she took her place in the procession beside a red-faced Stretton distant cousin she had never even seen before. She held Romy’s gloved hand firmly and led her past the flowers and out of the porch into the spring sunshine.
The sudden clash of bells broke out in the square tower above. In the bell room the estate’s own ringers had bent to their work at the bellmaster’s signal. In their braces and shirtsleeves they hauled on the rope sallies, hand over hand. There would be a full eight-hour peal to celebrate the Earl’s marriage.
Outside in the churchyard the music of the seven bells filled the thin air while the eighth, the tenor, wound its intricate way through the triples behind them. The circle of gravel in front of the west door of the church and the grass between the old gravestones was crowded with estate workers and Stretton villagers and pressmen and sightseers. The sound of the bells made them all lift their heads, and for a moment everything else was still.
Then beyond the lych gate Clio saw Hugo handing his bride up into a high-wheeled carriage. He tucked the swathes of her train tenderly around her. There was a pair of greys waiting in harness with a groom at their heads. The groom handed Hugo the whip, and amidst laughter and cheering and a shower of rice Hugo gathered the reins and drove his wife across the park and home to Stretton.
Romy had run to Cressida and was tugging longingly at her bouquet. An arm descended on Clio’s shoulder.
‘Tears?’
She saw that it was Jake.
‘Not serious ones. Just for the order of it, the pattern of it all. And for it not lasting after the next thing.’
‘I know,’ Jake said simply. ‘Odd, that, for people like you and me.’
He took a large folded white handkerchief out of the pocket of his trousers and handed it to her. From the door of the church Grace was watching them. She hesitated for a moment and then began to move slowly in the opposite direction, towards the lych gate. The churchyard was emptying in the wake of the bridal party. The family would make their way back to the house for the wedding breakfast, and the last preparations for the ball. Jake saw Ruth and his children walking ahead with Nathaniel.
To Clio he said, ‘Shall we sit here for a little while?’
There was a wooden seat beyond the gravestones, in the shelter of one of the great yew trees that marked the churchyard boundary.
She smiled gratefully. ‘Yes, please.’
The house would be a swarm of last-minute preparations, with men in green baize aprons and hurrying footmen and Blanche sailing through it all as if she were directing and orchestrating some great operatic production. Clio picked her way over the grass behind Jake. She read the inscriptions on the tombstones automatically, as she read everything. The members of the family were all buried in the family vault within the church, but the generations of names out here were still familiar to her. There were Dixeys, and Moores and Bridgers and Walshes, who had provided housemaids and grooms and keepers to the big house for as long as the Strettons had owned it, and who still lived in the village and the lodges and farms beside the estate. There was a stone plaque in the longer grass close to the wall, with a glass jar of fresh daffodils placed beside it. It was a memorial to the sons of the Dixey family who had died in France in 1916.
Clio sat down beside Jake on the wooden seat. It was quiet now, except for the bells, with the last of the congregation and the sightseers filtering away through the old gate. A man in a long green apron appeared and began to sweep up the rice and scattered petals.
Jake closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sun. The light was bright, but there was no warmth in it yet. Clio put her arm through his and lowered her head until it rested against his shoulder.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ Jake made his automatic response. He had been thinking about the girl, the miraculous girl called Lottie Brand who had appeared in his surgery and overturned the repetitive business of his life. He had fallen in love with her as soon as he saw her. He thought of Lottie in every private waking moment, but there were not many such moments available to him.
‘Ruth looks well.’
Ruth had lost some weight, and today she was buttoned into a tight olive-green costume that seemed to keep her snapping energy and her tart disapproval of this ostentatious marriage display of Hugo’s only precariously contained.
‘Yes, Ruth is well.’
Lottie Brand was thirteen years younger than Jake and she had once been his patient, although he had rapidly made her find another physician.
Jake had had other women, starting from almost immediately after Rachel’s birth, but he had never fallen in love with one of them until he met Lottie. She was the daughter of working-class parents from Clerkenwell, a tall girl with a wide smile and a mass of fair hair. Lottie was a dancer and had ambitions to be an actress; in the last year she had even played two bit parts and now there was talk of some film work. But she was quite ready to earn her keep if necessary as a waitress or a barmaid, or doing whatever else presented itself. Jake loved her for a variety of reasons, but the chief of them was her cheerful acceptance of whatever turned up in her haphazard life. Lottie was always ready to adapt, and she was happy and inquisitive and enthusiastic in ways he had never encountered in anyone else.
She was also the most uninhibited sexual partner he had ever known. Lottie would do anything, and she was capable of suggesting diversions that had never even occurred to him. Occasionally she made him feel like the awestruck boy he had been with Grace, long ago, in the corner beside the hawthorn hedge.
Sometimes, like now, it seemed to Jake extraordinary that such a girl could have any interest in a middle-aged and weary doctor, and also a torture that he could not spend every hour of every day with her, alone with her.
‘Jake?’
He opened his eyes on the churchyard, mossy tombstones and the square tower of the church. And the line of yew trees from which he and Julius as boys had illicitly cut branches, imagining that they could make longbows for themselves like the archers at Agincourt in Henry V. Hugo had sneered at the idea: rightly as it turned out. The bows had never worked.
‘Jake, what are you thinking about?’
‘I had a letter from Julius,’ he said hastily. He searched in the inner pockets of his tailcoat and eventually produced the letter in its envelope. He gave it to Clio.
Clio looked at the black, fluent handwriting. She unfolded the single sheet and read.
Julius had left London, claiming that he found it impossible to work there. He had told everyone that he was composing a piece of music and needed quiet and solitude in order to concentrate on it. He had gone away, to live in a rented cottage at the edge of the sea-marshes in a remote corner of north Wales. Clio puzzled for a moment over the multiple consonants of the address, and then concentrated on what her twin had written.
Julius explained to Jake that he was sorry that he could not come to Hugo’s wedding. It was a long way to travel just at present, and he couldn’t leave his cottage because he had adopted a dog. It was a Welsh collie, Julius said. His name was Gelert. He was working, or trying to work. It was difficult, because he could hear the music in his head but he couldn’t take hold of it for long enough to write it down. But the quiet was good, soothing, Julius wrote, and he liked to walk on the marshland. He sent his love to Jake, and to everyone in what he had no doubt would turn out to be a fine carnival at Stretton.
That was all.
Clio let the letter fall into her lap.
‘Jake, what do you think?’ Her voice sounded sharp. ‘It isn’t a long way to travel from north Wales to Shropshire.’
‘No. He doesn’t want to be here. It’s the old trouble, isn’t it?’
Jake’s thoughts looped from Lottie to Julius and to Grace in the long-ago field. Longing and desire seemed to twist
and snake through the broken stalks of the years, tracking him, scenting his steps. What Grace had done to them both, to Julius and himself. He wondered if she knew it. He remembered how in the church today she had sat as still as a figure in a portrait.
‘The old trouble,’ Clio said bitterly.
She was distressed that Julius had written to Jake and not to her. The letter itself made her fearful. His voice in it sounded muffled, deliberately so, as if Julius were cloaking some other truth with these distracted excuses about marshlands and elusive music. She wondered if he had not written to her because he knew that with her twin’s intuition she might read beyond the plain words.
Anxiety twitched in her, like a muscle tic.
‘When this is over I’m going to go up there to see him.’
‘Will he want you to?’ Jake asked. There were another twenty-four hours before Ruth and he could leave Stretton, twenty-four more stretching after that before he could hope to be with Lottie again.
Clio said loudly, ‘Whether he wants it or not. He needs somebody. I’ll take Romy, and say the two of us need a holiday by the sea, we needn’t stay where he is. Just near enough to see him and make sure there’s nothing wrong. We can try this town, what is it called? Abergele. How do you think you pronounce it?’
‘You could do that,’ Jake conceded.
The sun had dropped behind the tower. At once it was cold in the graveyard. Clio shivered in her wedding clothes. Jake took the letter from her gloved hands and folded it away in its envelope. He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he advised.
They stood up and walked across the shadowed grass. The families and the clergy and the more important of the church guests who had received an invitation would all be back at the house by now. A magnificent tea centred on one of three successive wedding cakes had been laid out in the salon. Jake looked at his watch and sighed.
‘Time – just time – for a quick snooze before we have to assemble on parade again. I am exhausted, and I have only been here for a day. How can Hugo and Lucy possibly endure it?’
Clio smiled. ‘They can do it precisely because it is what one does. There is a kind of magnificence in it, don’t you think?’
The dinner held for Hugo and Lucy’s wedding was for close members of their families alone, but even so the great mahogany table in the Stretton dining room was extended to its full length to accommodate almost forty people.
The footmen in their places behind each alternate chair wore white gloves and the Stretton livery, and their hair was powdered. There had been complaints from below stairs that the flour made the men’s heads itch intolerably in the heat, but Blanche had been implacable. Tonight, for Hugo’s wedding ball, no touch of grandeur was too grand.
The glow of dozens of candles shone in the silver and crystal down the length of the table. There were Malmaison carnations plaited with ivy in the filigree silver bowls.
Hugo sat at the head of the table, with his bride at the foot. Lucy was still in her wedding gown, but her veil and the little jacket that she had worn to the church had been removed to reveal a deep décolleté. The Stretton diamonds glittered around her throat. It clearly suited her to be the focus of attention. Her cheeks were pink, and she talked animatedly in this gathering of her parents and brothers and sisters and cousins.
Lucy would be a fine Countess, Clio reflected. She would charm the county and direct her household, but she would never do more than Hugo required of her.
Blanche was at the centre of the table. Her dress was dark purple velvet, cut to show off her fine shoulders, and worn with a feathered and jewelled turban of the same material. Clio thought she looked queenly, perfectly and fittingly imperious, as if tonight were the satisfying climax of a life’s diligent preparation. She outshone her daughters. Phoebe seemed faintly peevish, as if she regretted her own quieter marriage, and Grace had chosen to wear black lace, with her ropes of pearls as her only jewellery. She was sitting between two of the Frobisher men and her head was inclined as she listened gravely to what one of them was saying to her.
Clio smoothed her own skirts. Her own dress was an old one of Eleanor’s. She had discovered it, shrouded in tissue paper, in one of the tall cupboards on an upper landing in the Woodstock Road. It had smelt powerfully of mothballs when she lifted it out, but the folds of sea-green satin were fresh and unfaded. She had painstakingly unpicked the seams, in the quiet evenings in Paradise Square, and recut the bodice so that it fitted her narrower frame.
When she put it on this evening Romy had looked seriously at her. Then she said, ‘You look very, very pretty.’
‘Thank you, darling. But not prettier than the bride, I hope. That would be very bad form.’
‘Prettier than anyone. Daddy would be proud of you.’
Clio put down her comb, her fingers suddenly stiff. She could hear her own words, her constant reminder, coming out of Romy’s mouth. Was it right to keep this hope alive in her child, or should she let Rafael slip away, into the painless recesses of her babyhood? She stooped down and put her arms around Romy, drawing comfort from her, hiding her face from the clear eyes.
‘Thank you. I’m glad I look nice for Hugo’s party,’ Clio said.
Now, in her place at the dinner table, Clio lifted the glass of champagne that had been poured for her and drank half of it. She wanted the bubbles to pass directly into her bloodstream. The white-gloved footman at her shoulder placed a bowl of clear soup in front of her. The finest Stretton china had been brought out of storage. It was white and blue and gold, with the family crest in the centre of each piece. Clio looked up from her plate and saw Cressida.
She had been placed at the other end of the table, on the opposite side, almost as far away from Clio as it was possible to be. Her neighbours on either hand were occupied with separate conversations. Cressida did not seem to be looking at anything in particular. Slowly, but quite deliberately, she lifted her champagne glass as Clio had done. But when Cressida replaced hers, it was completely empty.
At five minutes to ten, Hugo led Lucy to the top of the great staircase where they would receive their guests. There was a newly installed electric switch on a small plaque to one side of the stairs. At exactly ten o’clock, Lucy pressed the switch. Outside, the whole of the great south front was suddenly floodlit.
Electricians had worked for a week to install the dozens of lights. Now, as the guests began to converge on the house, Robert Adam’s serene golden stone façade beneath its crowning dome was bathed in brilliance. The house was instantly visible for miles around, seeming to float in its dark ocean of parkland.
There had been dinners for the ball in all the notable houses within a radius of fifty miles. Every house had its own house-party, and now the guests were arriving at Stretton. Hugo and Lucy stood alone, at the top of the stairs, to welcome them.
There were county people, and hunting and sporting friends of Hugo, and girls who had come out in Lucy’s year and who were most of them married now, but there was also London Society. There were political friends and allies of both Hugo and Grace, from the Lords and the Commons, and there were cavalry officers from Thomas’s world, and the kind of smart young married couples that Anthony and Grace had once been and who were now the contemporaries of Phoebe and her husband. There were the young girls, the débutantes who would be presented at Court later in the Season, with Cressida amongst them, and their brothers and cousins and friends.
Clio watched them all arriving, the family tiaras and the jewels, and the dresses with the trains looped over the wearer’s arm, and the magnificent dress uniforms, and the stiff collars and snowy white waistcoats, and she heard the talk and laughter rising and seeming to gather and concentrate under the cool span of the Adam dome. From the Long Library, where the dancing had already begun, she could hear the music of Ambrose’s band. There was even a dance card in her own evening bag. Hugo himself had given it to her. She had kissed him, after the dinner, and wished him happiness.
‘D’you know, I am happy?’ he said, with the same dazed smile. ‘It seems more than a fellow has any right to expect. Clio, I can’t ask you for a dance. Anyhow, I never was much use at it, even with two legs. But will you dance for me, tonight?’
Clio was touched. ‘Yes, of course I will.’
She wandered through the thickening crowds. There were some people she knew, a surprisingly large number, now she was here amongst them. But there were dozens more faces that were familiar. She saw Lady Londonderry and Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Nancy Astor with her son Michael, and Lady Diana Cooper and Lord Halifax and Chips Channon and Diana and Oswald Mosley. These people must be here for Grace as much as for Hugo. For whatever reason, the world seemed to have converged on Stretton tonight. Their own miniature creation of a world, at least.
The ball was already in full swing. There was an atmosphere of determined gaiety. Clio could almost hear the resolution that was never spoken aloud, We should dance while we can. Who knows how soon we shall have to stop?
She paused at the open doors that led into the ballroom. She saw Eleanor waltzing in Nathaniel’s arms, and Blanche with Thomas, and as she watched them the colours of the ball-dresses and the flowers and the women’s jewels all seemed to blur together.
For an instant the ballroom became as complete and lovely as an impressionist painting, firmly fixed in its evanescent moment and resistant to closer scrutiny, because when she stared harder at it the perfection broke up once again into its component dots of dancers and flowers and candles in their sconces, and the picture in its completeness was lost to her again.
Clio stood still, blinking a little. As she surveyed this celebration of privilege and counted herself a part of it, she felt no rush of anger that it should be allowed to happen whilst in Europe Jews were being dispossessed and beaten and murdered by the Nazis.