by Rosie Thomas
The man leant across and lifted the trailing bow-rope of the Mabel. He made it fast to the stern of his own boat and then lifted his oars again. The two boats rose on the crest of a wave and plunged towards the beach.
A little knot of people had gathered, watching and waiting. As soon as the red boat came within wading distance, two men splashed out and hoisted the bundle of Grace between them. They ran back and grimly spread her on the sand, rolling her on to her belly, lifting her arms above her head.
Clio let herself be lifted in her turn, and then she was set gently on her feet. She wanted to run away up the beach, away from the sea that gnawed at her heels, but there was no power in her legs. She almost fell, but someone’s hands caught at her. Part of the murmuring crowd closed around her, and then she heard the very sound of the warm world, the lovely safe world. It was the faint crackle of starch. She lifted her head and saw Nanny’s apron, and half fell against it. The scent of laundry rooms and flatirons and safety overwhelmed her, and she looked up and saw Nanny Cooper’s face. Her cheeks were wet and her eyes were bulging with fear.
The boys had been hurried ashore. Jake and Hugo were shrouded in rugs and all of them became part of a circle that had Grace at its centre. The desperate business of the men with their huge hands, who bent over her and pounded at her narrow chest, seemed in futile contrast with her stillness.
Nanny Brodribb stood beyond them, her hands pressed against her face, her mouth moving soundlessly.
They waited a long time, only a few seconds.
Then Grace’s mouth opened. A flood of watery vomit gushed out of her. She choked, and drew in a sip of air. They saw her ribs shudder under the soaked dress.
The crowd gave a collective sigh, like a blessing. They closed in on what had become Grace again, living and breathing. Julius stumbled forward and tried to kneel beside her.
‘Give her room, can’t you?’ one of the men said roughly.
They turned Grace so that she lay on her back, and her eyes opened to stare at the sky.
Clio became aware of more movement beyond the intent circle. Blanche was coming, with Eleanor and Hills the chauffeur just behind her. The strangeness of it made her lift her eyes from Grace’s heaving ribs. There was no elegant glide now. Blanche’s head was jerking, she was hatless and her ribbons and laces flew around her. Clio had never seen her mother and her aunt running. It made them seem different people, strangers.
The two women reached the edge of the crowd and it opened to admit them to where Grace lay. Blanche dropped on her knees, giving a low moan, but no one spoke. They were listening to the faint gasps of Grace’s breathing, all of them, willing the next to follow the last. Jake and Hugo stood shivering under their wrappings of blankets. Nanny Cooper moved to try to warm them, with Clio still clinging to her apron. The other nanny began to trudge up the slope of the beach to where the small children had been left under the nursemaid’s eye. Clio took her eyes off Grace once more, to watch her bowed back receding.
They were all helpless, most noticeably the mothers themselves, kneeling with the wet sand and salt water soiling their morning dresses. They looked to the fishermen for what had to be done.
Grace’s stare became less fixed. Her eyes slowly moved, to her mother’s face. She was breathing steadily now, with no throat-clenching pauses between the draughts of air. The fisherman lifted her shoulders off the sand, supporting her in his arms. Another of the men came forward with a pewter flask. He put it to her mouth and tilted a dribble of brandy between her teeth. Grace shuddered and coughed as the spirit went down.
‘She’ll do,’ one of the men said.
Another blanket materialized. Grace was lifted and wrapped in the folds of it. Blanche came out of her frozen shock. She began to cry loudly, trying to pull Grace up and into her own arms, with Eleanor holding her back.
‘All right, my lady,’ another fisherman reassured her. ‘I’ve seen enough drownings. This isn’t one, I can promise you. Your boys got to her quick enough. Not that they should have took her out there in the beginning.’
In her cocoon of blanket, Grace shook her head. Her face was as waxen as if she had really died, but she opened her mouth and spoke clearly. ‘It was my fault, you know. Not anyone else’s.’
The fisherman laughed. ‘You’re a proper little bull-beef, aren’t you? Here. Let’s get you inside in the warm. Your ma’ll want to get the doctor in to look at you, although I’d say you don’t need him any more’n I do.’
He lifted Grace up in his arms and carried her. Blanche followed, supported by Eleanor and Hills on either side, and the children trailed after them, back to the big house overlooking the sea.
As soon as she was installed in her bed, propped up on pillows after the doctor’s visit, Grace seemed too strong ever to have brushed up against her own death. For a little while afterwards the boys even nicknamed her Bull-beef.
Clio remembered it all her life not as the day Grace nearly drowned, but as the day when she became aware herself that all their lives were fragile, and temporary, and precious, rather than eternal and immutable as she had always assumed them to be. She recalled how the land had looked when they were drifting away from it in the Mabel, and now that inviting warmth seemed to touch everything she looked at. The most mundane nursery routines seemed sweet, and valuable, as if they might stop tomorrow, for ever.
There must have been some maternal edict issued that morning for everything to continue as normal, more normally than normal, to lessen the shock for all of them. So the nannies whisked the older boys into dry jerseys and knickerbockers, and made Clio change her damp and sandy clothes, and by the time they had been brushed and tidied and inspected, and had drunk hot milk in the kitchen, the doctor had been and gone without any of them seeing him, and it was time for children’s lunch. There was fish and jam roly-poly, like any ordinary day. No one ate very much, except for Hugo who chewed stolidly. Clio wanted to cry out, Stay like this. Don’t let anything change. She wanted to put her arms around them all and hold them. But she kept silent, and pushed the heaps of roly-poly into the pools of custard on her plate.
Later in the afternoon, Clio found the two nannies together in the cubbyhole where the linen was folded. There was the same scent of starch and cleanliness that had drawn her back on the beach into the safe hold of childhood, but now she saw that both of the women had been crying. She knew they were afraid they would be dismissed for letting Grace go out in the boat.
‘It isn’t fair,’ Clio said hotly. ‘You couldn’t have stopped her. I couldn’t, nobody could. Grace always does what she wants.’ Anger bubbled up in her. Nanny Cooper had been with the Hirshes since Jake was born. She came from a house in one of the little brick terraces of west Oxford. The children had often been taken to visit her ancient parents. It was unthinkable that Grace should be responsible for her being sent away.
‘Don’t you worry,’ Nanny tried to console her. But it was one of the signs of the new day that Clio didn’t believe what she said.
In the evening Nathaniel arrived off the London train, summoned back early by Eleanor.
He called the three boys singly into a stuffy little room off the hallway that nobody had yet found a use for. They came out one by one, with stiff faces, and went up to their beds. When it came to Clio’s turn to be summoned she slipped into the room and found her father sitting in an armchair with his head resting on one hand. His expression and posture was so familiar from bedtimes at home in Oxford that her awareness of the small world’s benevolent order and fears for its loss swept over her again.
Nathaniel saw her face. ‘What is it, Clio?’
She had not meant to cry, but she couldn’t help herself. ‘I don’t want to grow up,’ she said stupidly.
He held out his hand, and made her settle on his lap as she had done when she was very small. ‘You have to,’ he told her. ‘Today was the beginning of it, wasn’t it?’
‘I suppose it was,’ Clio said at length.
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p; But she found that her father could still reassure her, as he always had. He told her that there was no question of any blame being placed on Nanny Cooper for what Grace had done. And he told her that the changes, whatever they were, would only come by slow degrees. It was just that from today she would be ready for them.
‘What about Grace?’ Clio asked. ‘Is today the first day for her, as well?’
‘I don’t know so much about Grace,’ Nathaniel said gently. ‘I hope it is.’
Clio wanted to say some more, to make sure that Nathaniel knew Grace had insisted on going out in the Mabel, and that she had just been showing off when she leapt on to the seat. She supposed it was the same beginning to grow up that made her decide it would be better to keep quiet. She kissed her father instead, rubbing her cheek against the springy black mass of his beard.
‘Goodnight,’ she said quietly. As she went upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Grace she heard Nathaniel cross the hallway to the drawing room where the sisters were sitting together, and then the door closing on the low murmur of adult conversation.
Grace was still lying propped up on her pillows. Her dark hair had been brushed and it spread out in waves around her small face. A fire had been lit in the little iron grate, and the flickering light on the ceiling brought back memories of the night nursery and baby illnesses. Clio found herself instinctively sniffing for the scent of camphorated oil.
‘What’s happening down there?’ Grace asked cheerfully.
Clio didn’t return her smile. ‘Jake and Julius and Hugo have been put on the carpet for letting you out in the boat.’
‘It can’t have been too serious,’ Grace answered. ‘Jake and Julius have just been in to say goodnight. I thanked them very prettily for saving my life. They seemed quite happy.’
‘Aren’t you at all sorry for all the trouble you caused?’
Grace regarded her. ‘There isn’t anything to be gained from sorrow. It was an accident. I’m glad I’m not dead, that’s all.’ She stretched her arms lazily in her white nightgown. ‘I’m not ready to die. Nothing’s even begun yet.’
Clio didn’t try to say any more. She undressed in silence, and when she lay down she turned away from Grace and folded the sheet over her own head.
In the night, Grace dreamt that she was in the water again. The black weight of it poured over her, filling her lungs and choking the life out of her. When she opened her eyes she could see tiny faces hanging in the light, a long way over her head, and she knew that she was already dead and lying in the ground. She woke up, soaked in her own sweat and with a scream of terror rising in her throat. But she didn’t give voice to the scream. She wouldn’t wake Clio, or Nanny who was asleep in the room next door. Instead she held her pillow in her arms and bit down into it to maintain her silence. She kicked off the covers that constricted her, too much like the horrible weight of water, and lay until she shivered with the cold air drying the sweat on her skin.
At last, with her jaw aching from being clenched so tight, she knew that the nightmare had receded and she could trust herself not to cry out. Stiffly she drew the blankets over her shoulders and settled herself for sleep once again.
Downstairs, after Clio and the boys had gone up to bed, Nathaniel went into the drawing room where his wife and sister-in-law were sitting together. They had changed for dinner, and in their gowns with lace fichus and jewels and elaborate coiffures there was no outward sign of the day’s disturbances. He had not expected that there would be. Blanche and Eleanor were alike in their belief that civilized behaviour was the first essential of life. Nathaniel had been fascinated from the first meeting with her to discover how unconventional Eleanor could be, and yet still obey the rigid rules of her class. She had married him, after all, a Jew and a foreigner, and still remained as impeccably of the English upper classes as her sister the Countess. He smiled at the sight of the two of them.
Nathaniel kissed his wife fondly, and murmured to Blanche that she looked as beautiful as he had ever seen her, a credit to her own remarkable powers of composure after such a severe shock. Then he strolled away to the mahogany chiffonier and poured himself a large whisky and soda from the tray.
‘I still think we should try to reach John,’ Blanche announced.
Nathaniel sighed. They had already agreed that John would have been out with the guns all day, and that now he would have returned there was no real necessity to disturb him. ‘What could he do?’ he repeated, reasonably. ‘Leave the man to his pheasants and cards. Grace is all right. I have dealt with the boys.’
Blanche closed her eyes for a moment, shuddered a little. ‘It was all so very frightening.’ Her sister rested a hand on her arm in sympathy, looking appealingly up at her husband. Nathaniel took a stiff pull at his drink. He didn’t like having to act the disciplinarian, as he had done this evening to the three boys, particularly when he saw clearly enough that it was Grace who had been at fault. The business had made him hungry, and he was looking forward to his dinner. He was congratulating himself on not having to sit down to it with fussy, whiskery, humourless John Leominster for company. He did not want him summoned now, or at any time before he had conveyed himself back to Town or to Oxford.
‘It’s all over now,’ he soothed her. ‘Try to see it as a useful experience for them. Learning that rules are not made just to curb their pleasure.’
And I sound just as pompous about it as Leominster himself, Nathaniel thought. He laughed his deep, pleasing, bass laugh and drank the rest of his whisky at a gulp.
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Eleanor supported him, and at last Blanche inclined her elegant head. The little parlourmaid who performed the butler’s duties in the holiday house came in to announce to her ladyship that dinner was served. Nathaniel cheerfully extended an arm to each sister and they swept across the sand-scented hallway to the dining room.
Nathaniel orchestrated the conversation ably, assisted by Eleanor, and they negotiated the entire meal without a single mention of death by drowning. At the end of it, when the ladies withdrew, Blanche was visibly happy again. There was no further mention of calling John back from his sport.
Nathaniel sat over his wine for a little longer. He was thinking about the children, mostly about Grace. He had not tried to lecture her, as he had done the boys. He had sat on the edge of her bed instead. Grace had faced him with the expression that was such a subtle mingling of Blanche and Eleanor and his own dreamy, clever, ambiguous Clio, and yet made a sum total that was quite different from all of them. He thought he read, behind her defiant eyes, that Grace had already been frightened enough and needed no further punishment.
They had talked instead about the girls learning to swim. He had made her laugh with imitations of the mothers’ reaction to the idea.
Now that he was alone Nathaniel let himself imagine the threat of Grace’s death, the possibility that he had denied to the women. His fist clenched around the stem of his glass as the unwelcome images presented themselves. It came to him then that he loved his niece. There was determination in her, and there was something else, too. It was an awareness of her own female power, and a readiness to use it. She was magnetic. It was no wonder that his own boys were enslaved by her, Nathaniel thought. And then he put down his glass and laughed at himself.
Grace was ten years old. There would come a time to worry about Grace and Jake, but it was not yet.
Nathaniel strolled outside to listen to the sea. He sat and smoked a cigar, watching the glimmering whitish line of the breakers in the dark. Then he threw the stub aside and went up to his wife’s bedroom.
Eleanor was sitting at her dressing table in her nightdress. Her long hair hung down and she was twisting it into a rope ready for bed. Nathaniel went to her and put his hands on her shoulders. He loved the straight line of her back, and the set of her head on her long neck.
Very slowly he bent his head and put his mouth against the warm, scented skin beneath her earlobe. Watching their reflections in the gl
ass he thought of Beauty and the Beast. His coarse black beard moved against her white skin and shining hair as he lifted his hands around her throat and began to undo the pearly buttons.
‘Nathaniel,’ Eleanor murmured. ‘Tonight, of all nights, after what has happened?’
‘And what has happened? A childish escapade, with fortunately no damage done. All’s well, my love.’ He reassured her, as he had reassured Clio.
All’s well.
His hands moved inside her gown, spreading to lift the heavy weight of her breasts. He loved the amplitude of her, released from the day’s armour of whalebone and starch. She had a round, smooth belly, folds of dissolving flesh, fold on intricate fold. Eleanor gave a long sigh. She lifted her arms to place them around her husband’s neck. Her eyes had already gone hazy.
Eleanor had had four children. Even from the beginning, when she was a girl of twenty who barely knew what men were supposed to do, she had enjoyed her husband’s love-making. But it had never been so good as it was now, now when they were nearly middle-aged. Sometimes, in the day-time, when she looked up from her letters or lowered her parasol, he could meet her eye and make her blush.
He lifted her to her feet now so that she stood facing him. Nathaniel knelt down and took off her feathered satin slippers. Then he lifted up the hem of her nightgown to expose her blue-white legs. His beard tickled her skin as he laid his face against her thigh.
An hour later, Eleanor and Nathaniel fell asleep in each other’s arms. In all the dark house, Grace was the only one who lay awake. She held on to her pillow, and waited for the water and her fears to recede.
Two
‘My mother was a Holborough, you know,’ Clio said.
Elizabeth did know. She also knew that Clio’s grandmother had been Miss Constance Earley, who had married Sir Hubert Holborough, Bt, of Holborough Hall, Leicestershire, in 1875. Her daughters had been born in April 1877.
Lady Holborough never fully recovered from the stress of the twin pregnancy and birth, and she lived the rest of her life as a semi-invalid. There were no more children. Blanche and Eleanor Holborough spent their childhood in rural isolation in Leicestershire, best friends as well as sisters.
