by Rosie Thomas
Blanche had flinched when the beam of sunlight touched her. She was thinking of Hugo, who had gone at last to join his regiment in France.
She knew that he would be killed, she knew it with unshakeable certainty, and when she thought of him, as now, the air itself seemed to bruise her with its weight of terror.
Blanche had to force herself to concentrate on Mrs Dixey’s broad back marching in front of her, to harness her thoughts to Stretton and these dim shuttered rooms. They were closing them up until the end of the war.
If the day ever comes, Blanche thought. And if I could close up the fear, as if it were the saloon or the yellow drawing room …
‘The china from these rooms is all packed in the chests now, my lady,’ the housekeeper said. ‘And stored in the billiard room, like you ordered.’
‘Very good,’ Blanche said automatically. The silver had been taken away to the security vaults, and the better pictures had been lifted down from the walls. There were darker rectangles on the faded silks and damasks, showing the places where generations of Strettons had stared down on their successors.
But in the saloon, the Sargent portrait still hung in its accustomed place. John Leominster himself had given the order for it to be left. ‘I like to know it’s there,’ he had said gruffly. ‘In the place where it belongs, even if nothing else is.’
Blanche had not asked him why, because to ask or answer such a question would not be part of their expectations of each other, but she guessed that he thought of it as a kind of talisman. Perhaps he attached some superstitious importance to it, imagining that the old, pre-war order it seemed to stand for would somehow exert its benign influence over Hugo’s fate.
She paused beneath the picture now, looking up into the innocent faces. As if it could, she thought bitterly. As if a society portrait of two silly girls could have any effect on Hugo in the trenches.
But even as she dismissed the picture she felt a wave of longing for the days it recalled, for the measured, orderly pre-war times that she was afraid were gone for ever. Her own bright painted face, and Eleanor’s mirror of it, seemed to belong to a different generation.
‘Not this portrait, you know,’ Clio had said once to Elizabeth Ainger, during one of her rambling monologues.
Elizabeth had barely glanced up at the picture that hung behind the old lady’s velvet chair. It was the work of a painter no longer very much admired, and she did not herself care for the violent expressionistic style. She knew the history of it, from family stories, and its title. The Janus Face. That was all.
‘I’m talking about the Sargent,’ Clio went on. ‘His portrait of Eleanor and Blanche. The Misses Holborough.’
‘I know,’ Elizabeth said. The Stretton family had sold the picture in the Fifties and it was now housed in a private collection in Baltimore. She had never seen the famous Sargent itself, only reproductions of it. She had suggested to her publishers that they might try to obtain permission to use the double portrait as a frontispiece for the book.
It was a pity, she thought, that the later picture, the one of Grace and Clio, was not more attractive or at least more celebrated.
‘This picture, the one of me and … and your grandmother, was intended to hang at Stretton alongside the other. But old John Leominster never liked it, and your …’
Clio paused and squinted sideways at Elizabeth, smiling a little. Elizabeth thought that she looked very old, and rather mad.
‘… the painter refused to sell it to him. He loaned it to my father, and there it stayed, in the Woodstock Road, for years and years.’
Clio’s head fell forward then, so that her chin seemed to touch her chest, and Elizabeth thought she might have fallen into one of her sudden sleeps. She could see the shape of her skull under the thin hair and paper skin, and she was touched with pity for her.
But then the skull-head jerked up again, and the surprisingly bright eyes flicked to her. ‘Such a lot of years, eh? Why are you interested in so much long-ago, forgotten nonsense?’
‘It’s my trade,’ Elizabeth answered, ‘I’m a biographer.’
The pity was still with her and she could not make herself say, ‘your biographer’.
Blanche turned her back on the mocking optimistic faces. She looked around the shadowy saloon again, up at the great glass chandelier that had been swathed in burlap, and at the ghostly shapes of gilt chairs and console tables under their dust-sheets.
The huge house seemed already dead. The clocks had been allowed to run down and not even their ticking disturbed the silence. Blanche imagined that she could hear the dust settling.
In September 1916 John Leominster had decided that it was his patriotic duty to free as many men as possible from his house and estate to help with the war effort. From the outbreak of the war the house had been run by a minimum of staff, but now Stretton was being entirely closed up. The land and the farms would be left in the care of a manager who would oversee the growth of food crops, and the family was migrating to London, to the Belgrave Square house.
‘You have done a very good job, Mrs Dixey, you and the men.’
The butler and two of the footmen, all too old for active service, were accompanying the family to Belgrave Square. Mrs Dixey and her husband, in their quarters at the far end of one wing, would be left as the sole guardians of a hundred lifeless rooms.
‘Thank you, my lady,’ Mrs Dixey said.
They hesitated, unbalanced for an instant in their familiar relation to each other by this dislocation of the house. The housekeeper saw the expression in Blanche’s eyes and understood it, because two of her own boys were in France. She wanted to put out her hand to touch her employer’s arm and say, ‘God will watch them for us.’ But she knew her place too well and stood silently instead, waiting to see if there would be any more instructions.
Blanche sighed. John was waiting for her in his office. ‘I think that will be all,’ she said. She crossed beneath the portrait without looking at it and walked slowly back over the thin bars of light.
John was sitting at his desk, staring into the pigeonholes with their neat sheaves of paper, but when Blanche came in his face lightened. He stood up and put out his hands to rest on her shoulders, then drew her closer to him. Blanche let her head droop until it rested against him. They stood still, finding comfort in one another.
Blanche and John had not founded their marriage on words, because John had never been able to express his thoughts or feelings. Instead, Blanche had learnt to interpret the different languages of their silence. She knew that he heard her fear, and shared it with her. She began to cry helplessly, her face pressed against the rough tweed of his coat.
Upstairs in the schoolroom, Grace was sitting alone on the floor. Nanny had taken eight-year-old Phoebe away to the nursery, to select whatever books and toys must be packed up and sent by the carrier to the London house. She had given Grace instructions to prepare her own belongings, as well as Thomas’s, who had returned to his prep school.
But Grace had not even opened the doors of any of the tall, brown-varnished cupboards that lined the room. She sat in a patch of sunlight with her legs stretched out in front of her, scanning the familiar surroundings.
At the old desk she had sat to listen to Miss Alcott, or one of her predecessors, stifling her yawns over the atlas or the French grammar. She wondered, if all the minutes were added together, how many hours of her life she must have spent staring out of the window, over the trees of the park towards the brown hills.
When they were both very small, she had had Hugo for company. But then Hugo had gone away to school, and all through the long termtimes she had suffered the governess alone. She had always hated her isolation and the unfairness of what she considered to be her imprisonment. The Babies had been no consolation. Even now, at eleven, Thomas was no more than an infuriating little boy.
Grace smiled suddenly. The holidays had been different. The holidays had always meant the Hirsh cousins, and when they were all at Stretton this room
had been their headquarters.
She scrambled to her feet now, and went over to the desk. It had a sloping wooden seat, worn shiny, connected to the desk part by braces of cast iron. The metal had been rubbed shiny too, by her own restless feet. Grace lifted the white china inkwell out of its round hole and turned it upside down. The ink had dried out, and Miss Alcott was gone. Grace was fifteen, and she was finished with the schoolroom.
She lifted the lid of the desk. One wet afternoon Jake had carved his initials with a penknife. She could see his face now, his tongue protruding slightly as he worked and a thick lock of black hair falling into his eyes. Grace ran her fingertips over the JNH. The letters were deep, and even. Julius had taken the knife from him after that. JEH was fainter, scratched rather than carved, but with curlicues extending from the arms of the H. Grace followed the flourishes of them with her fingernail, her eyes half closing.
After that it had been the girls’ turn. They had bickered about who was to go first, and then they had carved their semi-alphabets with laborious care. GEACS and CBAGH. Clio’s carving was better than her own, Grace saw now.
When the initials were all complete Jake had taken a pair of dividers and scratched a circle to enclose them all, the magic circle.
‘Grace? What are you doing?’
It was Nanny, calling from the nursery. Very gently, Grace traced the circle and then she lowered the desk lid, hiding the carvings once more.
‘Packing,’ she answered.
Grace didn’t want to move to London. The London house was gloomy, and the rush of the city outside seemed only to emphasize her isolation within it. Grace understood her own position perfectly well. She was too old for the schoolroom and too young to go out in Society, even the restricted version of Society that was all the war allowed. She knew that she was facing a prospect of suitable war-work under Blanche’s supervision; days of packing dressings for the Red Cross, or knitting socks, with walks in Hyde Park and tea with the daughters of Blanche’s friends regarded as adequate diversions.
Grace wished she had been born a boy. Then she could go to the front, like Hugo. She was quite sure that Hugo would come home again, so certain of it that she did not even bother to try to define why. He would come home, probably with a medal, and all the glory would be heaped on him.
There was no glory in rolling bandages. There was no glory, Grace thought, in any of the things she might do.
She wandered to the window and looked down. The trees showed the first yellow and ochre of autumn. Soon the frosts would come and there would be the scent of woodsmoke and apples, but she would be in London looking out into Belgrave Square.
It isn’t fair. I wish I were someone else.
It was a new sensation, for Grace, to be dissatisfied with her position in life. Until now she had always felt able to direct matters to suit herself, to arrange the world according to her own requirements. But she understood suddenly how small the world of her childhood had been, and realized that she was about to exchange that world for an adult one, no bigger and circumscribed by propriety and convention.
Grace lifted one fist and banged it against the glass of the schoolroom window. Then, out loud, she said the worst word she knew. The pointless syllable fell away into silence.
‘When will this war be over?’ she demanded of the empty room. She meant, When will everything else begin? Impatience budded inside her like an ulcer.
‘Grace, you haven’t done one single thing.’
In the doorway, Phoebe appeared and Nanny Brodribb behind her, standing with her hands on her hips. Grace knew that meant she was angry. She also knew that she could easily wheedle her back into a good humour.
‘Please, Broddy, will you start on it for me? I don’t know where to begin. I just want to go downstairs for five minutes and then I’ll be back, I truly promise.’
‘Will you, now?’
Grace went, leaving Phoebe clicking her tongue in imitation of Nanny. ‘Grace is very lazy,’ she heard her say.
The marble stairway that circled under the central dome was littered with woodshavings, curled like severed pigtails, and the wide marble expanse of the floor below was cluttered with boxes. An old man in a green baize apron was labelling each crate. Grace loved Stretton and had never considered that it would not stay the same for ever. She hated to see it dismantled like this, being packed away like a Whit Monday fairground.
She found her parents in her father’s study. As she hesitated at the door and saw them turn away from each other it occurred to her that they might have been embracing. The notion was embarrassing, and she forgot it as quickly as she could. She also saw that Blanche had been crying. The tears were for Hugo, of course. Grace shrugged, awkwardly, wanting to reassure her out of her own fund of certainty that Hugo would not be killed, but there was something in her mother’s defeatism that irritated her and diffused her sympathy.
‘Yes, Grace, what is it?’ John said. He had never been easy with his daughters.
As meekly as she could, Grace asked, ‘I wondered if I might go to Oxford, to be with Clio. Instead of staying by myself in London?’
John was never in favour of other people’s suggestions, particularly his children’s, and he stared at her now as if she had suggested removing to Australia. ‘What can you mean? You will not be by yourself. Your mother and I will be there, and your sister, and Thomas in the school holidays. As well as the rest of the household.’
Blanche looked at her daughter. She had expected that Grace would grow up to be calm and controlled, and pliant where necessary, but Grace was none of those things. She was eager and strong-willed, and so full of impatience and the taste of her own needs that Blanche was sometimes afraid she might split her own skin, showing the soft pulp beneath like a ripe fruit.
‘I think Aunt Eleanor has enough to worry about.’
Except that her sons were safe. Jacob had kept to his declaration of pacifism. He had deferred his entry into medical school and was serving in France as an orderly in a field hospital. Julius was on the point of entering the Royal College of Music.
‘She wouldn’t need to worry about me. Perhaps I could help her. Perhaps I could even go to Clio’s school for a few months. Until the war is over.’
‘I don’t know,’ Blanche said.
Grace did. She also knew when to save her ammunition. She smiled acquiescently now. ‘Well, perhaps,’ she said. She went back upstairs to the big brown cupboards and began laying out her own possessions and Thomas’s ready for transporting to London and Oxford.
Julius and Clio sat on a bench underneath the walnut tree in the garden at Woodstock Road. They were reading, and they sat turned inwards towards each other, their profiles identically inclined over their books. Grace had no book, and she had already walked the flagged paths between Eleanor’s flowerbeds.
‘You are very lucky,’ Grace said to Clio. ‘Do you know how lucky you are?’
The twins looked up at her, and it seemed to Grace that they smiled the same patient smile.
Grace had never felt jealous of Clio before. She had envied her the relative freedom of life in the Oxford house, and the constant company of her brothers, and her easy confident store of knowledge, but she had never before thought that it would be preferable to be Clio Hirsh than to be Lady Grace Stretton.
But now, it seemed, Clio had everything that she did not.
Jake was no longer at home, of course, but Clio still had Julius, and the bond between the twins had strengthened since Jake had gone away. When Blanche set her free at last, on a long visit to the Oxford family, Grace had plenty of time to observe her cousins. Watching them, seeing how comfortable they were together and how they seemed to know without speaking what the other was thinking, Grace felt her own solitude like an affliction. She wished that she could share the same intimacy with someone.
She found herself reaching out to Clio, on this visit, as she had never done before.
Without even admitting it to herself, Grace
had begun to dismantle the old barriers. She stopped trying to be better, or quicker, or louder, and she started to follow Clio’s lead. She wanted to be like a sister, like a third twin to Clio and Julius, instead of merely sharing the accident of a birthday.
Since the beginning of the war Clio had grown up and away from Grace, who knew she had done no more than mark time in the schoolroom at Stretton. Unlike Grace, with her undirected impatience and energy, Clio had acquired a sense of purpose. Encouraged by Nathaniel she had decided that she wanted to study for an Oxford degree in modern languages, and was planning to enter one of the women’s halls. She worked hard at her books, making Grace feel stupid and aimless in comparison.
Clio also had useful practical work to do. The house in the Woodstock Road was no longer filled with a stream of undergraduates coming to visit Nathaniel and to sit talking and arguing until Eleanor fed them. Most of the students had been swallowed up by the war and those few who remained were quieter and more jealous of their time. The house had seemed unnaturally empty and quiet until Eleanor had offered it as a convalescent home for wounded officers.
The men came in twos and threes, physically more or less repaired but in need of rest, and comfort, and security. Eleanor and Clio nursed them, but they also talked and read to them, and Julius played chess, and Tabby and Alice ran in and out of their rooms, and so the men were drawn into the family. They seemed to thrive in the warmth of it. Each time one of them became well enough to leave, the Hirshes said goodbye with as much affection as if he were a son or a brother.
Grace saw all this, and she admired it. She was always clear-sighted enough to know what was worthy of approval. She was generous in her open admiration of Clio, and Clio responded to her generosity.
For the first time Clio became the leader and arbiter, and in a matter of days she lost the layers of her own resentment and jealousy of Grace that had built up over all their years together. They became friends, knowing that they had never truly been friends before.
‘Why am I so lucky?’ Clio asked, still smiling. ‘I’ve got three pages of French translation to do, and an essay on Robespierre, and there’s an ink stain in the front of the skirt of my good dress.’
