by Rosie Thomas
It was only an illusion, of course. Max was far too careful of his paper baby to give her any real, threatening responsibility.
Clio stared at the opening paragraph again. She was beginning to form the heretical opinion that Max’s latest enthusiasm was for several thousand words of pretentious nonsense. She twitched the end of the plait that hung over her shoulder and laid it over her top lip, moustache-fashion, as she had done as a schoolgirl concentrating over an essay.
She heard the front door open and close downstairs. Jake was passing the solicitors’ offices that occupied the ground floor. He had been to take Ruth back to the nurses’ hostel.
They had deposited Pilgrim and Max on the corner of Charlotte Street and gone on to Julius’s digs. Between them Clio and Ruth had put Jeannie to bed, not very gently.
‘How can anyone live like this?’ Ruth had wondered, wrinkling her nose as she looked at the mess in the room. Clio had only laughed. They left Jeannie lying on her side – ‘In case she vomits in her sleep,’ Ruth explained – and snoring loudly. Julius was clearly relieved.
Jake came in and stood in front of Clio, his back to the fire. When she saw his face she put the manuscript aside.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked. His expression reminded her of the way he had looked when he was given a bicycle for his fourteenth birthday. He was dazzled, and at the same time afraid that the prize might be snatched away again.
‘I asked Ruth to marry me. She said yes.’
Clio leapt up and wrapped her arms around his neck. ‘I’m so pleased. I’m so happy for you both. Oh, Jake, I truly am pleased.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘When? When will it be?’
‘Next year, after I qualify.’
Evidence of Ruth’s prudent common sense in that. Nothing hurried, nothing impulsive. Clio held both Jake’s hands, looking into his face. His happiness was plain to see.
‘Grace, and now you. Only me and Julius left.’
‘Your turn will come,’ Jake told her. ‘You’ll see. If that’s what you want.’
‘I don’t think I know what I want,’ Clio said, almost to herself. She felt that the words struck an inappropriate, melancholy note. In a different voice she said, ‘There’s some tea, is that celebratory enough? There isn’t anything to drink.’
‘I never want to see another drink. This evening was so awful.’ They laughed at the recollection of it.
Grace’s engagement diary was lying on the table beside her bed, and she looked at it before she turned off the light.
Tomorrow she would have lunch with another friend, a young married woman like herself. They would eat very little and smoke at the table, in defiance of custom. They would gossip desultorily about the people they knew in common. In the evening Grace had accepted an invitation for Anthony and herself to dine with one of the couples in their set. There would be cocktails, more gossip, and perhaps a sortie to a nightclub. She would dance with the husbands of the other women, and flirt with them if she could summon the energy.
She hadn’t bothered to look at the arrangements for the day after that. She closed the little book and reached up for the light switch.
Grace lay and looked up into the darkness. She had locked the door that led into Anthony’s dressing room and bedroom. She waited to hear him turn the handle, wanting to know that he had tried to come in to her. She listened hard, straining into the silence with such intensity that she felt the pain in her temples. After all the drinking she had done she felt that the bones of her skull might collapse into the deeper darkness within her head. She didn’t hear anything.
Nine
Elizabeth’s visits to the house in Little Venice were sometimes fruitless. On the bad days Clio sat in her chair, outwardly the same small, upright figure, but her memory had slipped out of focus and she asked her visitor querulously why her tea was late, and where her usual nurse had gone. And then on other days her mind was clearer, and she seemed to welcome the opportunity to relive her memories.
On these days Elizabeth let her talk, interested in the links and connections of reminiscence although the threads were often buried too deeply for her to follow. She had a sense of the older woman’s recollections forming a fragile web, and her mind travelling out and along the filaments like the spider darting from its still place at the centre.
‘What was she like, when she was a little girl?’ Elizabeth asked once.
Clio had been rambling. One minute she was recalling the scent of the roses that Eleanor had grown in the Oxford garden, and in the next she was disparaging the upbringing of modern children.
‘We were taught to hold up our heads, speak when spoken to. We did the same for our own children. Cressida, Romy …’
Clio did not like to be interrupted in the unravelling of her memories. Her confusion was probably feigned, but her tetchiness was real enough. She waved her knotted hand impatiently. ‘Who? What was who like?’
‘Cressida. My mother. When she was small.’
There were photographs, of course. It had been one of Grace’s patient occupations to mount them in albums, each snapshot cornered with triangular hinges and captioned with names and dates. Elizabeth had been through all the big, heavy volumes, pursuing and reidentifying the faces that smiled out of groups on lawns, on beaches, or around tables. The thick, dark grey pages were brittle but well preserved, and still interleaved with whitish tissue that covered the hundreds of captured smiles like so many shrouds.
Amongst them there were pictures of Cressida in the elaborate baby clothes of the time, propped up against cushions or held by a uniformed nurse. There were more informal snapshots of her toddling in the sunshine with her hand in Anthony’s, or at Stretton perched on a tiny pony, or dressed up as Little Miss Muffet for some village fête with a mob cap on her head and a huge spider made from pipe cleaners crouching on her shoulder.
There were almost none of her alone with Grace. Elizabeth could only recall one. There was no caption beneath it, unusually, not even a date, but it was clearly Cressida’s christening. The baby was dressed in the Leominster christening robe, a waterfall of antique lace. Her mother seemed to hold her inexpertly, in a bundle, instead of showing her off. Only her round head and one small fist were visible. Grace was wearing a black and white organdie dress, trimmed with inset bands of ribbon. She gazed into the eye of the camera from beneath the brim of a black ciré hat decorated with osprey feathers. Her face was expressionless.
‘She was well behaved. A good, quiet little girl.’
Elizabeth nodded. Clio’s thoughts were still running on the social deficiencies of modern children. There was nothing there, and no point in pursuing the subject. She let her own mind wander.
Grace’s photograph albums were revealing, but only to a superficial level. It was most noticeable that for the years following the Brocks’ marriage until some time in 1927, almost all the photographs that Grace had chosen were of parties. There were the startled eyes and half-turned heads of flashbulb pictures snatched through a veil of cigarette smoke in nightclubs and restaurants, where the men had white ties and brilliantined hair and the women held glasses to lips painted a plum-red that looked black in the flash. Everyone seemed always to be laughing, or drinking, or tilting languidly back in a chair to squint through the smoke.
Other pictures were taken on country-house lawns, where terraces or open French doors provided the backdrop for informal groups in deckchairs or crowded hilariously on to sunbeds. The men wore flannels and the women sundresses, and they cuddled together on the beds and on the rugs spread out on the grass, husbands with other men’s wives, and the wives with anyone but their own husbands. Their mouths were often open because they were calling out to the photographer, and there were waving arms and bare feet and open-necked shirts. There was usually a portable gramophone, tucked beside one of the deckchairs, and a tray of glasses, and someone at the front striking a theatrical pose.
There were more pictures of parties on beaches in the South of Fra
nce, and some of the Venice Lido, with men and women in almost identical bathing suits that covered their shoulders and thighs. In these photographs there was more horseplay, with the women riding on the men’s shoulders and the men wrestling in the sand, and tanned arms draped over shoulders as they crowded together into the frame, all of them laughing in the sun.
There were photographs of two or three couples squeezed into big shiny cars, waving; of barely recognizable faces at fancy-dress parties; frowning through boot-blacking or beneath turbans; of tennis parties and race-meetings and Christmases.
Elizabeth noted that all these gatherings seemed to leave little room for the family. There were no pictures of Grace and Anthony alone together. When they did appear in the same photograph it was at opposite ends of some group, over a caption in Grace’s erratic handwriting that would read, ‘Reggie, Ivor, Viola, Katharine, self, Diana, St John, Duff, Anthony. Deauville, 1926.’
After the baby pictures Cressida hardly appeared at all. Sometimes she was there to one side, almost like a shadow, her pale face half turned from the camera or hidden by a hank of dark hair. She was in the very few family groups that Grace had recorded. There was one at Stretton, where she was a five-year-old standing solemnly in front of her uncle Thomas, and another at Oxford, taken a year or so later at a birthday party for Nathaniel. She was holding Tabby’s hand and looking over her shoulder, as if searching for Anthony in the row of men at the back. Grace was near the centre, giving the camera her expressionless stare.
Cressida was smiling in only two of her photographs, and in both of them she was alone with Anthony. In one of them he was swinging her in the air, and in the other he was on horseback. Cressida was perched in front of him, holding tightly to the pommel of the saddle, and her face was suffused with happiness.
Elizabeth had gone back to that picture again and again. All her prospecting through Grace’s albums of the Twenties brought her back to the same place. Cressida had adored Anthony. And Grace had never been a mother. She had been many things, the biographer’s dream and challenge, but not a mother to her only child.
Clio stopped talking, perhaps out of weariness, more probably because she had seen that Elizabeth was not listening. The two women sat facing each other, across the paraphernalia of Elizabeth’s notes and tape recorder.
‘Have you had enough for today?’ Elizabeth asked, as gently as she could.
She was always relieved when their interviews came to an end, but the relief was tinged with disappointment. She came away with the feeling that Clio could tell more, if she wanted to. Perhaps there was one story or one small detail that would illuminate Grace for her, but the old woman wouldn’t part with it. There was the barrier of dislike between them. Elizabeth knew that it was her own failure that she had been unable to make Clio like her, or trust her.
‘Have you?’ Clio snapped back.
‘No. If I’m not tiring you.’
Elizabeth gazed around the room, looking for something neutral to remark on, to set their talk going again.
There were no photographs here. None of her husband, or child, as if Clio’s happiness in the long years of her marriage was a matter to be kept private from visitors. There was only the portrait, The Janus Face, behind Clio’s chair. Elizabeth wondered yet again why she kept it there. Pilgrim’s reputation had risen and fallen, and then fallen further still. But he was still representative of the avant-garde of his period. There were three or four of his pictures in the Tate collection, although not currently on display. A major portrait of his was worth money, and Clio was not a rich woman. Elizabeth examined the streaming hair and the Amazonian shoulders, and the staring, straining faces.
‘You don’t like it, do you?’ Clio remarked. ‘You sit there, frowning at it.’
‘Does it matter whether I like it or not? I find it oppressive. The size of it, the weight, in a room this size …’
Surprisingly, Clio laughed. It was a thin, high sound, like the winding down of a mechanical toy. ‘It was once considered rather fine. I stopped asking myself long ago whether I really liked it or not. Here it is, and here it stays. Pilgrim gave it to me, you know, after my father died in 1942. For all those years it hung in the Woodstock Road. In the same place, facing the garden. Pilgrim only took it back once. For his big retrospective.’ When her memories took hold of her Clio’s voice grew stronger, and the swooping accent of the Twenties débutante more noticeable. The laugh came again, louder, a clockwork rattle.
‘Retrospective, dear, if you please. That was very Pilgrim. When was it, now? Nineteen twenty-six. Or 1927, perhaps. He must have been somewhere in his late thirties, no older than that. At the very peak of his popularity. There was a big party, a private view, in the gallery in Albemarle Street. I remember it so clearly. Everyone was there. Everyone.’
Elizabeth leant forward, looking at the revolving spools in her Japanese tape-recorder.
Clio grinned, it could only be described as a grin, showing the pink superstructure of her upper false teeth.
‘Grace and Anthony were there.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Elizabeth said.
‘I nearly didn’t go. I was working at the Mothers’ Clinic.’ She broke off and glared at Elizabeth. ‘Do you know about that? Do you know who Dr Stopes is?’
Elizabeth did know, from the papers Jake’s son had reluctantly allowed her to examine. She tried not to sigh. With the self-absorption of the very old, Clio was only interested in the narrow ribbon of her own history.
‘Yes, of course. The birth-control pioneer.’
‘I worked there with Jake, and Ruth. Ruth wouldn’t go on to the party, she didn’t care for that sort of thing. She went home to Lucas and the baby, and Jake and I drove to the gallery in my car. I had one of those little Austins, do you know about them?’
‘From Punch cartoons,’ Elizabeth said.
It was the beginning of 1927.
Clio had been working as an afternoon and evening volunteer at Dr Stopes’ clinic for almost two years. Ruth had taken her there the first time, as a visitor, when Ruth herself had just started work as a part-time nurse.
The Mothers’ Clinic occupied a small house in Marlborough Road, Holloway, two miles away from the almost identical terraced house that Jake had bought for Ruth and their two children in Islington.
Jake was a general practitioner, and his patients were drawn from the working-class population of the area. When Ruth was at home with Lucas, the first baby, and then Rachel, Jake would come in at night to find her with Lucas on her lap and the rosy-faced baby asleep in the bassinet beside them. He would sit down, unlacing his shoes, sometimes too tired and dispirited even to speak. More often than not he would be called out again, urgently summoned by some dirty barefoot urchin thumping on their front door.
Ruth knew what they always said, even though Jake was at the door before her.
‘It’s me mam, sir. She’s bin took bad. Me dad says can yer come?’
Or it was Grandad, or the babby. Or it was our Ruby, who had been up a back street or had resorted to one of her own knitting needles, and was lying bleeding on wadded newspapers with a towel between her teeth to stop her screaming.
‘If there weren’t so many of them,’ Jake would say when he came back. Ruth would watch him, washing his hands at the stone sink in the pantry and rinsing the soap out of the thick, dark hairs on his forearms. ‘If there weren’t too many children and too little money and food and affection to go round.’
Jake sometimes tried to remember exactly how it was that he had felt at the beginning, when he had decided to become a doctor. There had been a fiery idealism, he could recall that much, but the exact way that he had been driven on in his wish to help others now entirely escaped him. He supposed he must have believed he could improve the world for other people, his needy patients, through his own skill and dedication. The thought of the priggish boy, long vanished, made him turn down the corners of his mouth where there were lines deepening behind his thick b
eard.
It seemed now that the neediness far exceeded his small abilities, to the point where the vast sea of sickness and decay threatened to drown him. He longed to remember how it had been to feel confident of his own value. That would have been a comfort, as he had once found a comfort in clinging to pacifist beliefs in the midst of carnage. But the confidence had faded as he grew older, together with his pacifism. It no longer seemed to matter particularly how hard he worked, or how skilfully, since there was much more suffering in his practice alone than he could ever hope to put right. There seemed no particular reason to push himself any harder, because it would not achieve any significant result, any more than his most fervent denial of violence had saved the life of one single infantryman.
Jake wondered if this was how it was to be a grown man. There was a fading of intensity, that was all it was. Even the war and its aftermath receded, so there was a compensation for this dulling of his senses. He still dreamed of the field hospital, in vivid and nauseating detail, but his fury at the waste had all but gone.
He didn’t even tell Ruth when he had a dream now, although when they were first together she had held him and murmured to him until the sweating and shivering had stopped.
When he was tired and depressed, as he often was these days, Ruth would put her arms around his waist and rest her cheek against his shoulder. Ruth was still optimistic. She would say something to try to rally him, something like, ‘There’s the Clinic. It’s a beginning.’
The first birth-control clinic in London, the first in the entire Empire as Dr Stopes enthusiastically proclaimed, had opened in 1921. Jake worked there for two sessions a week, giving his services for nothing. Every married woman who made her way to it was carefully examined, in comfort and privacy, and then instructed by doctors and nurses how to use the method of birth control that suited her best. All the advice was given free, only the supplies had to be paid for.
