by Rosie Thomas
There were two younger children in the Stretton family too, Thomas and Phoebe, born four and seven years after the arrival of Grace. But all the younger children, cousins and siblings from Thomas right down to Alice, were always impatiently dismissed by the older ones as the Babies. For Jake and Julius and Clio and Grace only reckoned with themselves, or with Hugo as an occasional extra.
Downstairs, Alice’s screaming stopped abruptly. Nanny must have done something to pacify her. Clio strained to discern the other more distant noises. A door opened somewhere, and Clio thought she could just catch the click click of her mother’s heels across the coloured tiles of the hall. She would be walking quickly from her drawing room to Nathaniel’s study, perhaps with an armful of flowers from the garden, or the post to put on the corner of her husband’s desk. Clio smiled. At the heart of the house there was an absence of noise, the silence of Nathaniel working. He would be sitting at his desk or in the decaying armchair beside it, his beard sunk on his chest and his reading spectacles pinching the bridge of his nose. When he took the spectacles off he would massage the reddened place where they had rested.
The other noises were the ordinary sounds of the house in the Woodstock Road. The wood panelling and the floorboards creaked and protested under so many feet. The metallic rattle might be one of the two housemaids carrying an enamel jug of hot water to the nursery. The muffled thumping could be Jake descending the stairs, or Tabby banging her wooden blocks, or Mr Curler the handyman performing some repair job in the back scullery. And all these domestic sounds were wrapped in the outside whisper of the breeze in the garden trees. They made Clio feel comfortable; she had been hearing them all her life.
Now she turned her head, trying to distinguish the other sound that she was waiting for. The rattle of a car drawing up in the Woodstock Road would be an intrusion, the beginning of much more serious intrusions. Everyone else in the house was waiting for the car too, but the difference was that everyone else was looking forward to its arrival. Clio sighed. The car would bring Aunt Blanche for two days, and Hugo and Grace for much longer: their summer visit to Oxford.
Julius must have been listening too. He stopped playing in the middle of a bar, and it was two beats longer before Clio heard the throaty mumble of the idling engine at the kerbside.
A door opened inside the house and Jake’s voice rose up the stairwell. ‘They’re here!’
Clio swung her legs over the side of her bed and stood up, smoothing the layers of her skirts. She looked at herself in the small mirror hung over her plain wooden dressing table; a long look, without a smile.
Grace stood on the tiled path that led up to the front porch. She tilted her head back to gaze upwards at the Gothic windows and the pointed eaves and the absurd round turret under its witches’ hat of purple slate. Grace was smiling. She was glad to be here, she was always glad to be with her cousins. Jake ran down the steps from the front door and she held out her hands to him. He took them in his and leant closer, to kiss her cheek, as he always did. Grace slid away from him, leaving his lips pursed against the air, and she looked at him with amusement from under her eyelashes.
‘Hello Jake,’ she said, acknowledging him and demanding his acknowledgement too that she was older, prettier, more adult than she had been the last time they met, at Christmas. She had been silently practising the exact note all the way in the car. She was pleased to see that he did look again at her, with a different expression, still holding her hands.
Julius came out, with Eleanor and Nathaniel behind him. Julius was as tall as Jake but thinner, and he moved more tentatively, without his brother’s good-humoured confidence. Julius kissed Grace as he had always done. Grace did not try to demonstrate any changes to Julius, nor did she know that there was no need to because he saw them at once. Julius saw everything about Grace and remembered, storing up the precious hoard of memories.
Hugo had held back to help his mother down from the car. Hugo was nearly seventeen, almost grown up. He was fair like his father, even his colouring setting him apart from the others. Hugo shook hands heartily and automatically; Julius had once said that it made him feel like one of the Stretton tenants.
The sisters had kissed and Nathaniel had embraced Blanche before Clio appeared in the doorway. She came slowly down the stairs, listening to the confusion of greetings, and stood at the top of the front steps looking down. She saw that Grace’s navy-blue tucked linen dress was crisp, and that her own was creased from rolling on the bed. She also saw that Grace had done her hair differently, drawing it back over her ears to show more of her face.
‘Clio, oh Clio, I’m so happy to see you.’
Grace ran up the stone steps and flung her arms around her cousin. She hugged her, almost swinging her off her feet in her exuberance. At once Clio felt pleased and flattered and ashamed of her own reluctance. It was impossible not to love Grace for her warmth and enthusiasm and all the life in her. Clio hugged her back, murmuring that she was happy too. She was only thinking that Jake and Julius loved Grace, of course they would do, but that in return she behaved as if they were hers, by some seigneurial right.
They are not hers, Clio reiterated. She was fiercely proud of her brothers, and the pride was coupled with possessiveness.
‘You can have no idea how boring it has been at Stretton all these months,’ Grace was saying. ‘How much I have longed for company, died to be with you all. I would look out of the windows at the trees and grass and emptiness and moan with misery.’
‘What nonsense you talk, Grace,’ Hugo said briskly.
‘How would you know about misery, or ecstasy, Hugo, for that matter? When you are only concerned with cricket?’
Grace linked her arms through Jake’s and Julius’s and drew them up into the house with her. Clio followed thoughtfully behind, leaving Hugo to accompany the parents into the drawing room.
The four of them climbed to the playroom, their old headquarters near the top of the house. Over the years they had played and plotted across the worn carpets and horsehair sofas, and the scuffed tables and bulging cupboards showed the scars of imaginary battles and voyages. The room was so familiar to them all that none of them even glanced around. Jake dropped at full length on to one of the sofas, letting one long leg swing over the arm. Clio and Julius sat on the club fender, one on either side of the empty grate. They were alike, with the same narrow faces and the same peak of hair springing from their foreheads, but the family resemblance was just as strong between Clio and Grace.
Grace stood in the middle of the room, with their eyes on her. ‘Now, tell me the news,’ she insisted. ‘All the news.’
‘Jake is going to be house captain next term,’ Clio said proudly.
Jake and Julius were boarders at a school near Reading. Clio attended a girls’ day school in Oxford. Only Grace was being educated at home, by a governess, just as her mother and aunt had been at Holborough. She was quick-witted and had an excellent memory, but she guessed that she was not academically clever like her Hirsh cousins. She also knew that by comparison with them she was under-educated; Nathaniel was a great believer in the power of learning, whereas John Leominster considered it quite good enough just to be born a Stretton, especially for a mere girl.
The Woodstock Road house had always been full of books and atlases and globes of the night sky, taken for granted by the Hirsh children. Grace had concealed her ignorance by always trying to take the lead, directing the talk or the game on to ground that was safe for her. She preferred Kim’s Game to quizzes, fantasy to fact. She looked down at Jake now.
‘Isn’t that rather Culmington?’ she demanded.
Grace had coined the term from Hugo’s title. In the beginning they had used it to describe the qualities stoutly advocated by Hugo himself: decency and fairness and a willingness to play the game by the rules. There was no malice against Hugo in it, it was simply that the circle considered themselves more imaginative and less conventional than the Viscount. By extension the te
rm had come to refer to doing the right thing, public spirit, duty and virtue. To dullness.
Jake waved languidly. ‘One has to accept these tasks.’ He said to Clio, ‘Grace didn’t mean that kind of news.’ He knew that Grace was asking him to offer his equivalent of what now seemed so obvious and intriguing about her, evidence that he had grown up.
‘What kind, then?’ Clio demanded.
Grace began to walk to the window, measuring her steps. ‘News of life. Love.’
‘Love?’ Julius sniggered; reached across the gap of the fender to nudge Clio. Julius was still a boy, only thirteen.
Grace’s eyes met Jake’s, and they smiled. Watching, Clio knew that her cousin had created a pair with Jake, and that she and Julius were excluded.
At the window Grace spread her hands on the sill and looked down into the road. There was a grocer’s delivery cart clopping by, her mother’s car with the chauffeur polishing its gleaming nose, almost no one else to be seen. Oxford was asleep in the depths of the Long Vacation. But after Stretton the Woodstock Road looked as busy as Piccadilly.
‘What shall we do?’ she asked.
‘You choose. It’s your first afternoon,’ Julius said politely, wanting to cover up his lapse.
‘Pitt-Rivers, then,’ Grace answered.
They left the playroom and chased down the stairs, as if they were children after all.
Blanche and Eleanor were drinking tea together. Hugo had gone out, announcing that he wanted to look around the place. The next year at Eton would be his last and he planned to go up to Christ Church. His attitude to Oxford was already calmly proprietary. The other children laughed at this embodiment of Culmington.
They met Nathaniel at the bottom of the stairs. He had shrugged himself into his light summer coat, and carried his panama hat in one hand and a leather bag full of papers in the other.
‘We’re going to Pitt-Rivers, Grace has chosen. Where are you going, Pappy?’
‘Into College, just for an hour. If you would like, I will meet you at Pitt-Rivers and we can walk in the Parks.’
‘Yes, yes we can do that. Only don’t forget about us as soon as you get to College and sit there for hours and hours, will you?’
‘I’ll try not to,’ Nathaniel said, not denying the possibility.
They left the house and walked towards the city, through the patches of shade cast by the big trees lining the road and out into the sunshine again. Nathaniel walked quickly, taking long strides, but the children easily kept pace with him. When they came to the red-and-yellow bulk of Keble, with its chapel looking – as Clio always said – like some animal on its back with its legs in the air, they turned into Parks Road and Nathaniel left them.
The Pitt-Rivers loomed across the road. They hurried over to the arched entrance and the yawning attendant in his booth nodded them in. They passed through the door and into the museum.
The smell descended around them. It was compounded of dust, formaldehyde, and the exudations of rumbling hot-water pipes, animal skins and bones, and mice. The air was thick from being long enclosed, and the dim light hardly illuminated the exhibits in their glass cases. The silence was sepulchral.
The cousins breathed in; looked up into the wooden galleries rising above their heads where the occasional shuffling don might be glimpsed, and fanned out ready to make their tour of inspection.
They had been visiting the museum ever since they were old enough for Nathaniel to bring them, on wet winter afternoons when their woollen hats and mufflers steamed gently and added to the miasma. It had been an outing, a place where Nathaniel told stories sparked off by the sight of a gruesome shrunken head or a decorated shield, a mysterious treasure cave remote from the humdrum Oxford, and for Grace a source of information that she secretly gathered to herself. Grace knew about the earth’s mineral deposits because she had learnt the display labels beside the glittering chunks of quartz and mica and haematite.
Later, when they were a little older, Pitt-Rivers had become a place of refuge away from the house. No one ever objected to their making the short walk to the museum. They had drifted between the tall cabinets, peering in at the jumble of trophies within and then at their own reflections in the murky glass, waiting for something to happen.
Each of them had their favourite exhibits and they visited them in ritual order, jealously checking to make sure that each item of the display was intact. Jake liked the Mammals, a small collection of stuffed arctic foxes and ermines and skunks with mothy hides and bright glass eyes, their stiff legs and yellow claws resting on wooden plaques garnished with little fragments of tundra. Julius preferred the Story of Man, a Darwinian series of tableaux culminating in Modern Man, a wax dummy complete with bowler hat and starched collar. Clio headed for the Dinosaurs, peering upwards through the ark of a rebuilt rib-cage and sighing over the great empty skulls.
Grace’s favourite was Geology, considered very dry by the others. She could stand for hours looking at the black slabs stained with ochre iron, at polished golden whorls and salty crystals, and at an egg of grey rock split to reveal the lavender sparkle of raw amethyst.
She found that her rocks were all in their places, the labels beside them only a little yellower and the spidery handwriting fading into paler sepia. She rested her forehead against the glass, transfixed by the mathematical purity of hexagonal prisms of quartz. She was thinking that her mother’s diamonds came from the same source, from rocks like these chipped out of the deep ground somewhere. Grace liked the diamonds although they would be worn by Hugo’s wife, not her, but she preferred these other crystals still half embedded in their native rock. They gave her a vertiginous sense of the earth’s prodigality, her own smallness in comparison.
She was still leaning her head against the case when Jake came up behind her. He stood at her shoulder, looking down at the eternal display of stones. Then he shifted his gaze to Grace’s hair, a thick ringlet of it lying over her shoulder, and the lines of her cheek and jaw. He saw that her breath made a faint mist on the glass. He reached up with his finger and touched the haze, and it seemed such an intimate part of Grace herself that the blood suddenly hammered in his ears and he opened his mouth to suck in the thinned air.
With the tip of his finger in the mist Jake traced the letter G.
Grace turned to look at him then with colour in her face that he had never seen before. Jake felt as if a fist had struck him in the chest, but he looked steadily back at her. He saw the faint bronze flecks in the brown of her eyes.
Something had happened, at last.
Then they heard Clio calling them in the sibilant whisper that stood for a proper shout in the vaults of Pitt-Rivers. ‘Grace, Jake? Where are you? We’ve been here for an hour. Pappy will be waiting.’
‘We had better go,’ Grace said.
Jake stumbled after her, blinking, out into the July sunshine.
Nathaniel was sitting on a low wall reading a newspaper. His panama hat was tipped forward to shield his eyes from the sun and his leather bag stood unregarded at his feet.
They called to him, ‘Pappy, Uncle Nathaniel, we’re sorry to keep you waiting, don’t be vexed …’
Nathaniel did not look up. He was reading intently, his thick eyebrows drawn together and the corners of his mouth turned down in the springy mass of his beard.
‘Pappy …’
He did look up then. He was still frowning but he folded the newspaper carefully into its creases, smaller and smaller still, and poked it away out of sight between the books and papers in his bag.
‘Here you all are,’ he said, tipping his hat back as if he was glad of the distraction they provided. His frown disappeared a moment later and he stood up, swinging the bag over his shoulder by its leather strap and holding out his other arm to Grace. ‘Is everyone ready? Then off we go.’
They turned through the big iron gates into the University Parks. There was a vista of heavy-headed trees and smooth grass, and flowerbeds subsiding into high-summer exhausti
on. The scent of mown lawns was welcome after the thick atmosphere of the museum.
‘We should have called in for Tabby and Alice,’ Nathaniel said. He enjoyed having all his children around him. ‘They love the Parks.’
‘No, not the Babies,’ the older ones groaned.
Grace walked with her arm in Nathaniel’s, chattering to him. Clio and Julius and Jake walked close behind, following their shadows over the grass. Jake felt as if his eyes and ears had been suddenly opened. The colours were almost painfully vivid, and he could hear bees humming, even the splash of the river over the rollers beyond Parsons’ Pleasure. He struggled to listen to what the twins were saying, and to frame ordinary responses.
They came to the river rippling under a high arched footbridge. Clio and Julius ran up the steep slope of the bridge and hung over the metal railing to peer into the depths. When they were small they had dropped stones, and twigs to race in the winter currents. Today the river was sluggish, deep green in the shade of the willows. Jake caught the whiff of mud and weed.
Nathaniel said, ‘If you would like to walk up to the boathouse, we could take out a punt.’
Clio and Jake were enthusiastic. Punting was always popular with the Hirshes, and on a hot afternoon it was pleasant to lie back on cushions and glide over the water. Only Grace said nothing, and Julius was quiet too, observing her. Nathaniel led the way along the river path under the branches of the willows, to the point where the punts were tied up. The boatman scrambled across the raft of them, setting the boats rocking and the water slapping against the flat bottoms. Feather pillows were handed into one of the boats, and Nathaniel selected a hooked pole, weighing it critically in one hand.
