by Rosie Thomas
He closed his eyes, then opened them again.
Grace was looking steadily at him. ‘Are you tired? Does your head hurt?’ Her voice had turned gentle.
‘No. I’m not tired.’
He lifted her hand and held the palm of it against his lips.
As if drawn by an invisible thread, Grace leant towards him. She leant closer, until her cheek rested against his head. She could feel the silky texture of his natural hair and the rougher prickle of the new growth. She rubbed her cheek, turning her head so that her mouth was against his skull, and her chest seemed to tighten and expel the breath out of her lungs in a ragged sigh.
He said, ‘Clio,’ and she was startled because she had forgotten the deception.
To exclude it once more she drew her hand back, away from his mouth, and put her own lips in its place. Peter breathed in sharply, but then when her mouth opened a little he tasted the slippery heat of her tongue. He put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her so close to him that he could feel her small breasts against his chest. He pushed his tongue between her teeth, his own mouth widening. He was thirsty, and ravenously hungry.
Grace thought, What did Clio do yesterday?
It came to her that she didn’t know her cousin nearly as well as she had thought, and then that for now she was Clio, looking out from inside her. Or controlling her from above, like a puppet. The notion was intriguing, and oddly exciting. It was more exciting than what was actually happening to her.
Grace didn’t feel frightened by Captain Dennis, not in the way that Jake had frightened her with his furtive desperation. She felt pleasantly alive, and stimulated by his kisses, without being afraid that she might not be able to control him, or understand her own response.
She knew what she felt about this. She enjoyed being kissed by the damaged hero, she liked the way that he seemed to give himself up to her, with blind concentration. She was relieved to find now the first surprise was over that she felt cool, almost detached. She reached up and stroked back his hair, away from the stark white dressing.
Had Clio done the same thing yesterday?
When Peter opened his eyes her face was momentarily shot into bright and dark fragments, prism-edged, like broken mirror-shards. He waited for the visual disturbance to subside and her features reassembled themselves. For another instant there was a complete image but it was a double one, so that he saw two of her. Then the dark heads slid together and coalesced, and she was smiling at him, soft-lipped. They were both panting a little.
‘You are really here, aren’t you?’ he asked.
For answer she held out her two hands for him to take. They were warm and quite solid. He kissed the knuckles of each one in turn.
‘I can’t believe you,’ he said delightedly. ‘You are a miracle.’
‘If I were a miracle, I wouldn’t have to go now and do the tea-trays.’ Clio would be home soon.
He was anxious immediately. ‘Will you come back again?’
‘Of course I will. When I can.’
After she had gone, Peter Dennis lay back against his pillows and slipped into an erotic reverie of the kind he had not had for two years. Love and sex had been a part of the old world, the one he had exchanged for the trenches. He was astonished to find that he could re-enter the old kingdom so easily.
And in her turn Grace might have been amused to know that Peter’s imaginings were set in an idyllic water-meadow backed by a hawthorn hedge.
When the starched nurse came in she looked sharply at her patient and then pronounced, ‘You are looking very much better, Captain Dennis.’
‘I am feeling very much better, nurse, thank you,’ Peter agreed with her.
Clio came home from school, bumping her bookbag down on the console table in the hall and sending the cards and papers piled on it whirling to the floor. ‘I’ve so much work to do. Miss Muldoon is a tyrant, a vile tyrant. I wanted to be free on Saturday, and now I shall have to plough through a thousand pages of Racine. You’re so lucky, Grace, you just don’t know.’
‘I’ll do your chores for you, if you like,’ Grace offered.
Saturday was important. It was Alice’s sixth birthday, and there would be a family party. Jake and Julius were coming home for it.
Clio’s face lightened. ‘Will you, really? If I go straight up and start on it now, I might just finish it by Friday. You are a true friend, Gracie. I’ll remember you in my will.’
Grace had been intending to confide in her. She had imagined that they would enjoy the mischief of the confusion together, playing at being one another as Eleanor and Blanche had done in the ballrooms twenty years before.
But she watched Clio unpacking her books, and said nothing. Clio could play at being Grace, of course, as easily as she could play at being Clio. There was a different, darker satisfaction in keeping the secret just for herself. Clio was preoccupied with her languages, busy and productive, while Grace had no such focus. The image of the puppeteer manipulating the strings came back to her.
There was a moment when she could have said, Something quite funny happened when I took a book in to Captain Dennis. Then the moment was gone.
‘Here I go,’ Clio sighed.
‘I’ll bring you up something to eat when I’ve done the trays.’
Clio blew her a kiss from the foot of the stairs. Grace did the extra work with an assiduity that made Nelly and Ida exchange surprised glances behind her back.
Later, when the girls were preparing for bed, Clio asked, ‘Have you met the new patient yet? Captain Dennis?’
Grace concentrated on her own reflection in the looking glass as she brushed her hair. She shook her head.
Clio was smiling, wanting to offer something, a confidence, in exchange for Grace’s earlier generosity. ‘He’s … interesting. Rather beautiful, in a way.’
‘The damaged hero, you mean? Another one.’
‘Oh, no. Not another, not at all. He is quite different.’
In the glass Grace saw that there was warm colour over Clio’s throat and cheeks, and her eyes were shining. Clio was ready to fall in love, and Grace felt the allure of responsive strings in her fingers. The temptation was too strong to resist. The chance to influence Clio’s love affair more than compensated for not having a love of her own. Grace didn’t think beyond that. For two or three days, until Alice’s birthday, she enjoyed the challenges of her complicated game.
Clio’s attention was torn between the books waiting on her desk and the turret room. For the first time in her life she experienced the thrill of neglecting what she was supposed to do and indulging in what she was not. She would wait in agony for what she judged to be the safest moment, then quietly close up her grammar and slip through the shadowy house to Peter’s door. He would look up when she came in, with a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty, and when she sat on the edge of the bed he would put his arms up around her neck and draw her down beside him.
Sometimes they would kiss; more often they would lie quite still, their mouths just touching, talking in whispers. Clio told him everything, about Jake and Julius and their childhoods, about Blanche and Eleanor and their different marriages, and Stretton and what had happened to Hugo, and about Grace.
‘Why haven’t I seen Grace yet?’ Peter asked once.
‘I think she’s piqued because I’ve claimed you for my own,’ Clio said, not pursuing the topic. She was quite happy for Grace to keep her distance.
At other times, Peter would begin to talk about the war. From the way his words came, reluctantly but inevitably, Clio understood that he could never close his mind to what he had seen and done. He tried to obliterate it, but he could not. She felt it always there, a long shadow between them.
Sometimes he would remember the men in his company, recalling their jokes and their idiosyncrasies and smiling at the memory so that he looked much younger, the boy that he must have been. Almost always, it seemed, these reminiscences ended with Peter saying, ‘He was killed, not long after th
at.’
‘What was it really like?’ Clio asked once, her whisper almost inaudible.
There was a silence before he answered her.
Then he said, ‘Like nothing you should ever know about.’
He turned her face between his hands, so that he could look into her eyes. It was difficult for him to focus on her face, so close to his. He could see the dark fringe of her eyelashes, the glint of reflected light in her pupils. Her breath was warm and sweet. He felt in this safe place that he was bathed in happiness, like sunshine.
‘I love you,’ he told her.
‘I love you too,’ Clio breathed.
Grace had to plan her own visits with even more care. She watched and waited, and then flitted like a shadow up the stairs and passageways that led to the turret: she had to avoid the nurses, and Eleanor on her rounds, and Nelly and Ida with their clanking hot-water jugs, and Clio herself.
The best time was the quiet middle of the afternoon, when Eleanor was resting in her bedroom and the maids had retired to sit with Cook in the kitchen. The nurses withdrew too, to what had once been the housekeeper’s parlour at the back of the house, where they could be summoned by an ancient system of brass bells if any of the patients needed them.
On the first afternoon Grace had thought of putting on one of Clio’s school tunics, but she dismissed the idea as too difficult to explain away if anyone else in the household should catch sight of her. She made do with a plain linen blouse and flannel skirt, and she plaited her hair in a long braid, like Clio’s.
‘Don’t you have to go to school? It is a weekday, isn’t it? Or have I lost count?’ Peter asked in puzzlement.
‘It’s Wednesday, all day,’ Grace laughed. ‘I’m supposed to be working at home. Preparing for examinations.’ She changed the subject quickly, not eager to be questioned too closely about which examinations.
She quickly discovered that it was easier not to talk very much at all. There were too many potential pitfalls in conversation. She stretched out beside him instead, measuring her supple length against him. And at the beginning, he was a willing participant. He was even the leader in their explorations of one another.
Peter was a virgin, technically. But there had been a girl at home, the daughter of one of the tenant farmers on his father’s estate. In the summer after he had left school, before he joined his new regiment, the girl had taken a fancy to him. He could still remember the smell of dust and saddle soap and horse sweat exuded by the blanket that they spread on the floor of the barn loft, and see the dreamy, intent expression on the girl’s face as she unbuttoned his clothes and took hold of him with her cool hand.
‘Please,’ he had begged her. ‘Please, let me.’
‘No-o,’ she whispered. ‘I darena’. What would I do wi’ a babby?’
‘I’ll be careful,’ he said in his innocence. The girl only giggled.
‘For sure you will. But I’ll not let you, whatever. Look, this is what you do. It feels just as good, I tell you.’
She had guided his hand until his fingers slipped in the silky wetness and rubbed against a hard nub of flesh. She had stretched out on the blanket then, with her skirts up around her waist, exposing her thin white legs and a patch of dark red hair. She had closed her eyes, sighing and lifting her narrow hips under his hand. It seemed to Peter that she took her pleasure and achieved satisfaction with the same uncomplicated innocence as the cats in the farmyard.
‘That’s right,’ she said afterwards. ‘Now I do it for you, see?’
She did, with quick, businesslike strokes, and he groaned when the milky jet spurted over the blanket to lie in glistening clots between their bodies.
Peter knew that it was not as good as burying himself inside her, but it was good enough. There were variations, too, they discovered together before it was time for him to leave for France.
Part of him longed to rediscover all those variations with this miraculous Clio. When she wasn’t with him he thought of it constantly. But when she did come to his room he was immediately and painfully conscious of every creak and whisper in the old house, imagining a footstep outside the door, voices intruding on them, staring eyes and shocked exclamations.
‘What’s the matter?’ Grace whispered. ‘Don’t you like it when I do this?’
‘I like it too much,’ he answered, half-ashamed.
She was much braver than he was, much more reckless. She seemed to have no fears of discovery. Her hand brushed against him, and he felt that it was hot through the thin sheet.
Peter had begun to be puzzled. He admired her, he was captivated by her in all her moods, but he was confused by her capriciousness. Sometimes when she came she was demure, even shy, seemingly happier to lie in his arms and whisper disarming confidences than to touch and tease. She said, I love you, and he believed her. And then at other times she was evasive, except in the matter of her thin, smooth body. The heat in her seemed almost febrile. He would follow her lead and then he would shiver with the fear that someone would come in and discover them.
If he told her he loved her then she would only smile, and look at him from beneath her dark eyelashes.
He felt more comfortable with her innocent, confiding manner, but it was the other one he dreamt of when he was alone.
He lay in his room and for all his satisfaction otherwise his thoughts circled around the mystery of it, as if he could not keep his tongue away from an aching tooth.
At last he said to her, when she slipped into the turret room on Friday evening. ‘Wicked Clio, today, is it?’
Clio was in her bedroom, finishing her translation. Alice was being put to bed in a state of furious over-excitement, and the rest of the household was preparing for the birthday party and the arrival of Jake and Julius. Grace had stretched out full-length on the bed beside Peter, her head propped on one hand. Unusually, her hair was loose and a strand of it lay across Peter’s shoulder.
She hesitated only for an instant. Then she looked full at him. ‘What can you mean by that?’ she asked, in her teasing voice. ‘I am never wicked.’
His eyes met hers. She saw that he was serious.
‘You know what I mean.’
Grace had sensed his confusion, almost from the moment he had become aware of it himself. She had understood that whatever it was that Clio and Peter did or talked about together, it was different from what she did. She was not finding out what it was like to be Clio, only setting herself further apart from her. She was not directing anything, and she had no power at all. She was simply involved in a mean and sordid piece of trickery.
The realization had made her feel miserable and defiant. It was worse because she had grown to like Peter Dennis, and to wish that he might like her for herself, rather than for her inept version of Clio.
She wondered now if she had said or done something obviously wrong, or omitted to do something else, and so given away her wretched secret. She had already decided that it was time to stop her visits. She would change her clothes and give herself an elaborate coiffure, and re-introduce herself as Grace. If it was not already too late.
She answered warily, ‘I don’t think I do know.’
She saw that he hadn’t guessed, but that he must do soon.
Peter sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter, then.’
Grace sat up. ‘I’d better go. Mama needs help downstairs.’
He held her wrist then, unwilling to let her go in either of her incarnations. ‘Stay.’ He wanted to force her back against the white pillows, shutting out her life that he didn’t know beyond the door of the turret room. He wanted her to belong to him, with all her inconsistencies.
A little of Grace’s confidence flooded back. She did have her own power that was nothing to do with Clio. She had learnt that from Jake and Julius.
‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ she promised. One last time, she told herself. She leant over and kissed him, and for a moment the dark veil of her hair obscured the light.
In the morning Clio sa
id happily, ‘I’m so looking forward to you meeting my brothers.’
She had brought his breakfast tray. Instead of her school uniform she was wearing her best dress, hyacinth-blue crêpe de Chine with the faint traces of an ink stain in the front panel of the skirt. The bodice had slightly too many fussy ruches and pleats, but Peter thought she looked beautiful. He wanted to reach out for her, but the morning nurse was bustling in and out with her thermometer and hot water. They contented themselves with touching hands when her back was turned.
‘I’m looking forward to it too,’ he said.
Clio had talked a lot about her brothers. He knew that Jake had finally been invalided home from a hospital in France, suffering from pneumonia and exhaustion. He was a medical student now, at University College in London.
He knew about Julius the violinist, too. Clio talked less about her twin, but he guessed that it was because there was a closeness between the two of them that went deeper than words. He was particularly curious to meet Julius Hirsh.
While they were talking, they could hear Alice’s high-pitched voice rising excitedly through the house. Now she materialized in the open doorway and blinked at Peter. Her springy black curls had been pulled back into a tight braid, and her round face suddenly looked older.
‘I’m six,’ she said importantly. ‘My cousin Grace did my hair grown-up for me. It’s my birthday.’
‘I know it is. May I wish you many happy returns of the day?’
Alice had firm likes and dislikes, not always logically based. She included Peter amongst her likes. ‘Thank you. Did you buy me a present?’
Clio remonstrated. ‘Alice!’ but Peter held up his hand.
‘I am afraid I didn’t. It isn’t very easy for me to buy presents, lying here like this.’
‘Pappy and Mama gave me a dolls’ house. With furniture.’
‘I see. Is there a dog kennel?’
‘Of course not.’
‘All dolls’ houses need a dog to guard them, and a kennel for him to live in. I will carve you one. I happen to be a very fine wood-carver.’
