All My Sins Remembered

by Rosie Thomas

  When they sat down to breakfast together Grace and Cressida dutifully asked one another about their respective days, but they did not talk very much otherwise. They very rarely spoke about Anthony.

  If anyone had asked her whether she was happy, Grace would have said that she was content. She did not have any expectation of happiness. But, as it happened, nobody did ask her. Her busyness was an effective screen. Even Jake, who worried that she never allowed herself to cry or to be weak, did not presume to mention the fact of her prickly defensiveness to the coming young woman of the Conservative party.

  Clio and Grace saw one another only rarely. The main link between their two households in these early years of the 1930s was Alice.

  Alice was twenty in 1932. She had inherited her father’s height and her mother’s statuesque figure. She was neither graceful nor particularly pretty, but her large, oval face with regular features and wide, clear eyes that rarely blinked gave the impression that somehow she saw more than was apparent to other people. Her blunt manner made an odd contradiction to this impression of sensitivity.

  Alice’s hair had always sprung off her broad forehead into thick curls, and in defiance of fashion she wore it long, in a Pre-Raphaelite cascade, or braided into thick coils over her ears. Phoebe Stretton called her the Dear Old Ox, or Patient Griselda, but the nicknames were not very apt. Alice was full of uncomfortable passions. She was clever but her cleverness lacked focus; she was affectionate but touchy; and she loved company, especially the company of good-looking young men, but was too shy to take much advantage of it when it presented itself.

  Alice had come out two years earlier. Her Season had been a half-hearted affair because she was the last of the daughters, and even Blanche and Eleanor no longer had much appetite for the ritual. There had been her own dance in Oxford, shared with another girl, and the usual round of London dances in reciprocation. Alice had twice fallen desperately in love in the course of her year, but neither young man had quite come to the point of proposing marriage.

  After that Alice tried hard to find something to do. Tabitha was still living at home in the Woodstock Road. Tabby was quietly religious, and she was content with her Church and with her job as a teacher in a local kindergarten. There had been some talk of Alice training as a teacher too, but that plan had come to nothing. She did a secretarial course instead and for a few months worked as a secretary to a London publisher, a friend of Max Erdmann. During the week she stayed with Clio and Miles in Gower Street, sleeping in the bedroom that had once been Julius’s. Miles mostly ignored her but he did not object to her being there, only remarking that the rent was useful. Clio was glad of her company.

  But before she had been in the job very long Alice gave in her notice, for no particular reason. She went back to Oxford for a little while, where she worried Nathaniel and annoyed Eleanor with her lumpish indecision, and then made her surprise announcement.

  ‘I’m going to live with Grace,’ she said to Clio.

  Alice had never lost the puppyish admiration for her older cousin that had sprung into focus when Anthony was electioneering at Stretton. Now that Grace was a member of Parliament herself, she was Alice’s heroine. Alice interested herself in economic affairs and unemployment and measures for the restoration of world trade, just so that she could talk intelligently to Grace about them. And Grace responded to her with a kind of absent-minded affection that occasionally kindled into direct if amused encouragement, making the flame of Alice’s devotion burn up even more brightly.

  ‘Why are you going to live with Grace?’ Clio asked.

  Alice’s broad cheeks were hot with happiness. ‘I’m going to work for her. I’m going to be a kind of assistant. In her political work, you know. I shall deal with some of her correspondence, arrange her appointments diary, travel up to the constituency with her. There will be plenty to do.’

  She was so proud that Clio had to swallow her instinctively doubting response. ‘I’m sure there will. It sounds very interesting.’

  ‘Grace can’t pay me very much, of course, but that doesn’t matter at all. I’ll have my bed and board, and I don’t need much else.’

  Alice had a small income of her own, just as Clio did. It was like her, in the grip of one of her passions, to deny that she had any requirements beyond food and somewhere to sleep.

  ‘What does Pappy say?’ Clio asked.

  Alice looked surprised. ‘He wants me to do whatever will make me happy.’

  Clio nodded. Nathaniel had never been able to deny Alice anything that she wanted.

  ‘And what does Cressida think?’

  Alice only shrugged. ‘You know what Cress is like. No one ever knows what she thinks. And Grace still imagines that we will be jolly company for each other.’

  Clio said sharply, ‘Alice, you will be kind to her, won’t you? Cressida doesn’t have a very easy time.’

  Alice only looked back at her out of her clear eyes. ‘What? Oh, yes, of course I will.’

  So Alice moved into Vincent Street to become Grace’s willing lieutenant. When anyone telephoned the house it was usually Alice who answered, and it was Alice who was the guardian of Grace’s engagements diary, her correspondence, even her wardrobe. Alice had little interest in her own clothes, but she made painstaking lists of which outfit Grace had worn to which engagement, and with which accessories, so that she could rotate them efficiently for her.

  Grace accepted the devotion lightly. She said that Alice was making herself very useful, that she seemed to be enjoying herself, and there was not much else that family needed to know about the arrangement.

  Eleanor fretted a little to Clio. ‘Why does Alice want to act as some sort of unpaid secretary-companion to Grace?’

  ‘She needs to devote herself,’ Clio answered. ‘Alice needs a cause.’

  ‘And what about the people she meets there?’

  Eleanor meant Grace’s political friends, of some of whom she and Nathaniel disapproved.

  ‘Alice isn’t a little girl any more. She can make her own judgements.’

  ‘You are all grown up,’ Eleanor said sadly. Clio saw the soft lines of regret in her face.

  ‘Aren’t you happy to see us all launched in the world?’

  ‘I wish you were babies again.’

  Once, Eleanor remembered, long ago, she had gone into a bedroom where Jake and Julius were asleep. There had been the sound of the sea beyond the curtained window, so it must have been at one of the summer holiday houses. She had bent over Jake and he had stirred in his sleep, then reached up to put his hand in hers. She had held it, noticing the size of it, almost as big as her own where it had once been a tiny curl of fingers. She had leant over to kiss him and the scent of his head had been the same as his baby smell.

  She was still young then, still the mother of young babies, but she was overwhelmed with the sense of loss of that one babyhood, and also by the awareness of time passing, declining, running away from her.

  The feeling came back to her now. She made an effort to dispel it.

  ‘I suppose all women yearn for babies. And there are always the grandchildren.’

  ‘Yes,’ Clio said stiffly. ‘Always the grandchildren.’

  Grace had told Cressida that Alice was coming to live in the house with them, and that Alice would be company for her because she was so busy herself.

  ‘I don’t need company,’ Cressida said. ‘I’m quite all right with Nanny and Cook.’

  ‘Company of our own kind, darling. Be a good girl, won’t you?’

  That was all. Cressida withdrew further into her reading and her story-writing, and let Alice eagerly scoop up whatever crumbs of Grace’s life fell her way. She made it clear that she didn’t welcome Alice’s company, any more than Alice wanted to bestow it on her.

  Early in 1932 there was a party at Vincent Street.

  It was not a large, lavish party of the South Audley Street kind because Grace no longer had the money or the space to entertain on a gr
and scale, but still she liked things to be done properly, as she expressed it. She would give a little shrug as if to say: These are not my requirements, but it is what one must do.

  ‘Will you arrange some of your lovely flowers, darling?’ she asked Alice, and Alice brought in armfuls of striped lilies and arranged them in tall vases on the console tables in the drawing room. Streaks of tigerish pollen daubed her nose when she looked in the glass in her bedroom. They made her look interestingly pagan. She smiled at the thought as she rubbed them away, and changed into her best dress with a puff-sleeved bolero to cover her shoulders. As an afterthought she wound a tiger-print scarf in her curls.

  ‘You look splendid,’ Grace called over her shoulder. She was filling one of Anthony’s monogrammed silver boxes with Turkish cigarettes.

  ‘I wish I could look like you.’

  Grace laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. My looks are no longer an issue of any significance. Whereas you have everything ahead of you.’ Downstairs the bell rang. ‘Oh God, right on the dot, of course.’

  Alice had addressed and posted the cards of invitation so she knew all the guests by name, if not by sight. But she did not immediately recognize the tall man who came in alone when the party was at its height. He stood in the doorway, waiting with lazy expectancy as if he knew the company would come to him, rather than being under any obligation to make a foray into it.

  Alice saw Grace detach herself from a group of people and go to greet him. He took both her hands and kissed her on the mouth. Alice was near enough to them to overhear what he said. The man’s voice was low, but his proximity seemed to sharpen her ears.

  ‘Ah, Grace. I wish you had come with us. We could have achieved so much, with the right blood.’

  ‘You may yet achieve it. But I must stay where I am, you know.’ Then she turned, still holding his hand. In a different voice she said, ‘Look, everyone is here. Won’t you come and meet?’

  It happened that Alice was part of the group Grace drew him into. He seemed to know everyone but her. When Grace came to introduce him and he held out his hand to shake hers she looked up at him. He was dark, with black horizontal brows and sharp, bright eyes. He had a dark moustache and a mouth that crooked at one corner.

  ‘Alice, this is Sir Oswald Mosley. My cousin, Alice Hirsh.’

  ‘Tom,’ the man said. He had a firm grip.

  Alice knew who he was before Grace told her his name. Sir Oswald Mosley had been a Labour politician, a Cabinet member, until the year before. He had left the party and with five other MPs had founded his own New Party. There had been much talk, and more promises. Yet, for some reason, the New Party had failed to attract the membership its founders had hoped for. Left-wing newspapers were beginning to describe the new organization as ‘fascist’, and Mosley had just returned from a visit to Mussolini in Rome.

  But still, Oswald Mosley’s brilliance was widely admired. People even now spoke of him as a future Prime Minister.

  Alice felt her mouth drying and a red flush spreading over her collarbones beneath the bolero jacket.

  ‘You are Grace’s cousin,’ he said. He was examining her, still smiling. Alice wanted to keep his attention, but at the same time she wished he would move on and leave her to shrink back into anonymity.

  ‘Yes. Our mothers are twin sisters.’

  ‘Of course. I remember now.’

  Did he? she thought wildly. Why should he remember something as trivial as that?

  ‘Tell me your name again.’

  She was almost whispering. ‘Alice. Alice Hirsh.’

  ‘Hirsh?’ Mosley nodded. He pushed his lips out under the soft bristle of his moustache as if committing the syllables of her name to memory. Then he drew his heels together and made a small, precise bow. He was swept away at once by a dozen other people competing for his attention.

  Alice stepped backwards. She folded her hands behind her. The palms were damp, and they made a tiny kissing sound when she pressed them against Grace’s cream-painted wall. From her corner Alice watched Tom Mosley moving through the current of the party. He was like a river pike, she thought, in the shoals of minnows.

  She was still watching as he left, escorted to the door by Grace. When he had gone the room seemed dimmer. Alice looked up to see if one of the little electric bulbs had failed under its cream silk shade.

  The party was a success, as Grace’s parties always were. The last group of guests bore Grace away with them, to dine at the Savoy Grill.

  ‘Will you be all right, darling?’ she called to Alice.

  ‘Yes. Of course I will. Have a lovely time.’

  When she was alone she made a slow circuit of the room. The ashtrays were filled with reddened butts and the tables were ringed with the interlocking prints of cocktail glasses. The air was heavy with smoke, and the final musk notes of a dozen different perfumes.

  There had been other parties, similar in almost every respect, but even the stale air of this one seemed to contain a new and significant scent. Alice lifted her head, like one of the foxhounds in the Stretton coverts. She picked up the discarded glasses and examined each one before placing it on a tray. Was this the one the man had used?

  It took her a long time to clear the drawing room. Cressida did not appear at any point. Alice took the glasses and ashtrays down to the kitchen and helped Mabel and Nanny to wash them up.

  It was the end of the following day before Alice encountered Grace again. Cressida had already gone to bed when Grace came home from the House and dropped her fur wrap on one chair, her bag and gloves on another, her papers on a third.

  ‘Dear Lord, what a day. Anything in the post, darling?’

  ‘Nothing important. Lots of thank-you notes. Shall I fix you a drink?’

  ‘Whisky and water, very weak.’ Grace kicked off her suede shoes and rested her feet on the sofa cushions. She took the glass that Alice gave her and watched her over the rim of it.

  ‘The evening went off well,’ Alice said.

  ‘Marvellous clearing up job, lamb, I do appreciate.’

  ‘I’m happy to do it. I enjoyed it all,’ Alice answered truthfully. And then after a minute, ‘I … thought he was rather impressive.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Grace murmured.

  ‘Sir Oswald. Um, Tom.’ She wanted to talk, like Phoebe and Tabitha when they were giggling girls, but part of her also wanted to keep this new scent to herself, hoarding it, lest it should evaporate. She pretended to be busy with the coal scuttle. Grace said nothing, waiting until Alice had to look round at her again.

  After a moment their eyes met.

  ‘I shouldn’t fall in love with Tom Mosley, if I were you,’ Grace drawled.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of doing anything of the kind.’ Alice went stiff with indignation. ‘I said I thought he was interesting. His ideas interest me, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you know what his ideas are?’

  Alice knew something. She knew that his New Party had been formed less than a year before in contempt of the old men of politics. Its goals were an ending to class warfare and the introduction of radical economic measures to bring prosperity back to the nation. She knew that Mosley believed in government by a small, strong executive without much accountability to an enfeebled Parliament, and she had heard the same principles described as fascist.

  But somewhere, she remembered, she had heard or read a claim of Mosley’s. He had said that, given a quarter of a million pounds and the support of a press baron, he could ‘sweep the country’.

  The words had stirred her then, that was why she remembered them. Now they came back to her, and affected her more deeply. The country needed to be swept. All the stifling ills of stale government by timid old men, the economic cowardice and unemployment and the miasma of failure that gripped them now, they all needed to be bundled up and swept away.

  The man with the black moustache and the bright, penetrating eyes was the one to do it. Alice was suddenly certain of that. He was brave enough, and he had
the determination. It was the raw potential of his power that she had scented last night, through the smoke and the lilies and the women’s perfume.

  The New Party had failed, but Mosley’s bearing seemed to indicate that that did not matter. Alice felt within herself that it did not matter either. There was a way forward, she was sure of that, and she knew that Tom Mosley could find it. The country would be swept.

  If I could be part of that, she thought. She held the idea within herself, protecting the flare of it as if she cupped her hands around a flame.

  Grace was lying back against the cushions. One silk-stockinged foot drew apparently idle circles, but she was watching Alice intently.

  ‘He asked you to join his party, didn’t he?’ Alice demanded.

  ‘Yes. I thought hard about it. I admire him personally, like all sorts of other people from Bob Boothby to Aneurin Bevan. I also think that his economic ideas are very sound. But in the end I decided I could be more useful by staying where I am, within our own party.’

  You were afraid to risk your own seat, Alice silently translated. Oh, if I had been in your place, I would have gone.

  ‘In the end he only recruited five Labour MPs and one Conservative. I think subsequent events, catastrophic election results and the pitched battles and the violence that seem to follow him wherever he goes, have proved me right.’

  ‘What will he do now?’ Alice asked.

  ‘I should still like to see him doing something splendid. Heading some force for change that would be clear-cut and strong and incontrovertible.’

  ‘Like Hitler in Germany?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Grace mused. ‘But I don’t think that anything as modern and coherent as Hitler’s movement will ever be possible in this poor, damp, vacillating country of ours.’