by Rosie Thomas
‘He likes it. Says it is divinely decadent. Don’t know why he wants to be there, with Hitler and all the rest of them,’ she told Clio, and coughed derisively through the smoke of her cigarette. ‘How’s that lovely brother of yours?’
‘Pilgrim has probably seen him more recently than I have.’
Julius had not come home for Christmas. He sent imaginative presents for all of them, and a long letter mostly concerned with his work.
‘Pilgrim is in Berlin too, I believe,’ Clio answered her father.
Nathaniel’s face turned sombre. ‘I wish Julius would come back. It is time he came home.’
Clio tried to be light. ‘Perhaps there’s a reason for him to stay. Perhaps there’s a girl.’ Only it was more likely that Julius stayed in Berlin because it was easier not to see the only girl he wanted, than to see her and be unable to have her.
‘Perhaps,’ was all Nathaniel would admit, without a smile.
New Year came and went. Clio and Miles did not stay up to see in 1933. Miles was in the grip of one of his depressive fits, and Clio did not believe that the new year would bring anything different from the old one, so had no reason to celebrate it.
January was cold, and fog-bound, and the blackened façades of the very buildings seemed to exude a miasma of soot and ice as Clio plodded past them on her path between Fathom and Gower Street. On the thirtieth of the month Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and torchlight parades of brownshirts marched through Berlin to the cheers of the crowds.
Clio fell ill again. On the last day of January she got up and went to the office, to finish work on the proofs of the next issue. But by lunchtime she was coughing so much that Max Erdmann came out of his office.
‘Go home, Clio, for God’s sake. Go to bed, and don’t let me see you again until you are fit company.’
Max was being kind to her. It made Clio think that she must be really ill. She put the cover on her typewriter and took her coat off its peg. She walked back through the Bloomsbury squares, where the dripping branches of the plane trees made frayed black lace-work against the yellowish sky.
She collected the morning’s post from where it lay on the mat inside the front door and went up the stairs. Her feet felt heavy, and she tried to suppress the need to cough that sawed in her chest.
She put the key in the lock of their door, turned it and pushed the door open. She saw at once that the gas fire was burning under its little domed hood, but the sitting room was empty. Miles had gone out and left it on. The thought of the shillings ticking away in the meter made her angry. She coughed, and threw the sheaf of letters down on the table.
Then she stopped. The flat was very still, filled with an odd silence that seemed to press outwards on the walls and windows. The sounds she made were amplified beyond their proper value.
Clio walked through to the door of her bedroom and opened it.
Miles and another man were lying in the bed together.
There was a rush of sensations, seeming to make a great noise and confusion in her head. She saw that her husband was lying on his back, with one arm crooked behind his head. The sheet had fallen back to expose his naked chest and the marble-white roll of flesh below his rib-cage. She saw that the other man was black-haired, and that he looked as rough and dirty and dispirited as the husbands of any of the women who came to Jake’s clinic.
Was this what people would do for money? Clio thought.
She had no doubt that this was a commercial transaction.
Miles did not move. He only looked back at her, in defiance, or a kind of relief.
Clio knew that she would remember his exact expression. She would remember the other man’s coarse features, the way his fingers on her bedsheet were rimmed with black. She would remember each detail, even through the tumultuous confusion of horror, and revulsion, and shame that threatened to overpower her now. She would not be able to forget.
The tableau was like some terrible caricature of her marriage, with this man lying prone in her place. Whenever she thought of her marriage she would see this, the two faces staring at her.
She took two steps backwards, with her hand cupped over her mouth. Her fingers were shaking. With the other hand she groped for the door handle. She found it, smooth and hard, and jerked sharply at it. The door closed and she was left staring at the wooden panels. There was dust in the mouldings and in one spot a rash of tiny splinters, like the stubble of a man’s beard.
The unopened post was still lying on the table where she had left it no more than a minute before, aeons ago. Outside in the street it already seemed to be growing dark. She could hear the traffic swishing past.
Clio left the flat and went back down the stairs and into the freezing afternoon.
With no idea of where she wanted to go or what she might do she began to walk. She walked a long way, through the streams of shoppers in Oxford Street and then down the shining wet arteries of Hyde Park. It was intensely cold and she walked quickly, trying to keep the blood moving inside her. The briskness of her movements contradicted her sense of having come up against a blank wall, at the end of a mean cul-de-sac that her life had become. The route did not offer any way forward, or any escape to either side, and she did not see how she could go backwards and undo what had already been done.
On the other side of the Park the trickle of homegoing office workers became a steadier flow. She had no idea where she had been, and could not have retraced her steps. She went into a workmen’s café and sat at a zinc-topped table warming her fingers around a thick white mug of tea. She ordered pasty slices of white bread and butter and then sat staring out through the steamy glass without touching them. She paid for what she had ordered with fumbling fingers, staring at the coins as if they were some unfamiliar currency, and then left the shelter of the café to walk on again.
She had not intended it, and had given no thought to the direction her feet took her, but in the early darkness she found herself standing at the end of Vincent Street. She looked at the lights of Grace’s house, and then saw that there was a taxicab waiting outside. The motor was running and the cabbie had wound down his window. Clio could see the plump cloud of his breath.
The front door opened and Grace bobbed down the steps. She was wearing her furs and carried a leather portfolio under her arm.
Clio took a few steps, uncertain whether to turn forward or back, and then she began to run. Her feet were pinched and blistered in her office shoes and her legs and her chest ached.
She called out, ‘Grace! Grace, wait for me …’
It reminded her of when they were children, running over the sand after the boys, each of them determined not to be left behind, not to come panting and last to the latest discovery.
Grace heard the uneven clatter of Clio’s heels. She turned and saw her running, then put out her arm to catch her. They swayed together for an instant, as if they both might fall. Then Grace steadied them. There was a streetlamp in its blueish nimbus over their heads, and by the light of it Grace looked into her cousin’s face.
‘Come with me,’ Grace ordered her.
The cab rumbled along the Embankment. Inside it Clio felt placid in her exhaustion, with the lights outside swimming in the river mist and the driver’s broad back insulated beyond the thick panel of glass. She was conscious of Grace’s profile rising out of the silver-tipped swathe of fur. In the regular slices of light, before the darkness claimed her in its turn, she could see the sheen on her silk-covered calves and the neat Louis heels of her shoes. Her kid-gloved hands were folded on the leather portfolio.
There did not seem to be any need to recite what had happened.
Are you really going to marry that little queer?
Clio could hear the words as if Grace had only just uttered them.
They were almost at the House of Commons before Grace broke the silence. Her kid forefinger tapped the leather in her lap. ‘I’m speaking in the House tonight. The debate is on women in prison, you kn
ow. Will you sit in the gallery to hear me?’
‘Yes.’ Clio’s voice cracked. She said more loudly, ‘Yes. I would like to hear you.’
She found herself in the Visitors’ Gallery. It was almost deserted. She leant over the balcony and looked down into the chamber of the House, thinking how small it was. There were men’s bald heads and red faces, and so few women amongst the men. Grace came in, having removed her furs and her hat. She looked up at Clio as she took her seat.
Clio listened to the debate, and at the same time her mind slipped and looped through the nets of memory. Distant events, childhood times, all rose up and haphazardly jumbled with the sharp details of today, and the dreary planes of the last months. She felt rudderless, able to swing with the currents, and her random meditations threw up at one minute an image of children’s initials carved in a desktop, at the next the black fingernails of the male prostitute lying in her bed.
The debate went on. There was so much rhetoric, Clio thought. So many flying words and unpinned ideas that would all drift together in the end, into random heaps, like dead leaves to be stirred up by the wind. She felt cold, and she wrapped her arms around herself and tried to concentrate on the speeches. She knew that she was feverish and that she should go home to bed, only she had already tried to do that and now she could never get into that bed again.
Grace was on her feet. She had taken notes out of her folder, but she did not look at them. She spoke in her natural voice, calm and fluent. She began to describe the plight of women prisoners, their enforced separation from their babies and small children, mistreatment by prison warders and brutal conditions.
Poor women, Clio thought. She gazed down on the rows of men, but she began to see the faces of the women who had swirled past her in the streets that afternoon. With her feverish sharpness of recall she could see individual sets of features, young and old, preoccupied or vacant, hopeful or desperate or dull. Amongst them she began to see herself, as a child and then a young woman, and Eleanor was with her, and there were other women she knew around them, from each of the different strata of her life.
Pity for all of them warmed inside her. She was sorry for Eleanor and Blanche, left behind by the unrolling of time, and for Ruth who could not make Jake happy, and for Alice and Cressida, and desperately merry Phoebe and poor, sodden Jeannie, and Isolde who wasted her brightness on Pilgrim; and she was sorry for herself.
Down on the floor of the House Grace began to wind up her speech. She quoted statistics on repeated offenders and the effect on them of a more liberal prison regime. Her arguments for penal reform for women were cogent, persuasive.
Clio did not feel sorry for Grace. Somehow, as always, Grace seemed to stand apart from her, and to be ungoverned by the common rules. Grace was so strong, and Clio knew that she needed that strength now. She had come for it, seemingly unwittingly, walking blindly through the streets on the darkest day she had ever known.
Grace’s speech was well received. A confused rumble of ‘Hear! Hear!’ rose up to the Gallery as she sat down.
The debate wandered on. So many words, Clio thought again. The confusion of memories claimed her.
When she looked down to Grace’s seat once more she saw that it was vacant, and a moment later Grace appeared beside her. ‘Come home with me now,’ she commanded.
They took a cab, driven by a different man in a frieze coat, back through the foggy streets. The house in Vincent Street was quiet and warm. Nanny and Mabel the cook must already have retired to bed, because when Grace led Clio downstairs the kitchen was empty. Grace made Clio sit in the chair beside the stove while she heated milk and found a tin of cocoa, and it came to Clio that she had not seen her perform any domestic task since the days of carrying trays up to Peter Dennis.
How long ago.
Grace looked at her, and read her mind. She laughed.
‘What a great fuss, wasn’t it? Poor Captain Dennis.’ She gave Clio the hot drink, and then hunted in the dresser cupboard. She found a bottle of brandy and poured some into two glasses.
She settled herself at the table next to Clio. ‘You had better tell me,’ Grace said.
She listened, saying nothing. And then at the end she took Clio’s hands between her own. She rubbed them, looking down at the blue veins and sinews under the thin skin.
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Clio. What are you going to do?’
‘I can’t go back.’
‘Stay here with me.’
‘Not just tonight, I don’t mean that. I can’t ever go back. I feel as if everything ended today. Have you ever had that feeling?’
‘When Anthony died.’
Clio bent her head. Their clasped hands lay on her knees. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered in her turn.
‘Don’t be. I can tell you this, everything hasn’t ended. That’s the bloody point. It goes on, and you have to find a way to manage it. It’s the going on, day after day, when it should all have ended, when the lining of your skull and the soles of your feet and your bruised skin all tell you it should have finished for you, that is what is really difficult. But you have to do something just because you are alive.’
‘Is that how you felt?’
‘More or less.’
‘But you went off and got yourself elected to Parliament.’
‘Yes, I did.’
Clio looked at her. There was Grace’s strength, defined and incomprehensible. She had allowed Clio a brief insight into her grief, and she had felt it under her own skin and in her skull so that Grace had almost become one of the company of women. But then she had shifted her position and the chink had closed, and Grace was apart again. I wish we were closer, Clio thought. I wish we could ever have been close to each other.
‘What will you do?’ Grace asked.
I can’t become an MP. I can’t go back to Fathom, or my own home, or to Oxford …
Hectically, feeling Grace’s eyes on her, she began to improvise. ‘I’m going to go away. Right away, from London and everywhere else I know. There are all these paths I’ve been treading, round and round, for so long. I’m going to walk clear away from them.’
‘And so where will you go?’
Don’t press me. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. ‘Abroad, probably. I speak French and German. I’ve never been anywhere, much. I don’t have any money, now I come to think of it, so it will have to be done on a shoestring, not the Grand Tour or anything like that …’ An immensity of problems seemed to crowd in on her. Where to go, how to convey herself through the maze of ticket halls and cheap hotels and restaurants? She felt her weakness like an affliction.
Grace said coolly, ‘You own your flat, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sell it. You don’t want to leave it for him to live in, do you? You can borrow some money against it in the meantime.’
‘I could do that.’ A step, appearing as if the tide ebbed against a flight of steps in a sea-wall to reveal first the shiny ledge, suggesting the others still submerged.
‘I have an idea,’ Grace said.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m going to Germany soon, on a political visit, to Munich and Berlin. I want to see this Volkwerdung with my own eyes.’
‘Volkwerdung,’ Clio repeated, giving it the correct pronunciation. ‘Awakening of the people.’
Grace laughed merrily. ‘Come with me. Come and be my interpreter. Just for two weeks, it can be a holiday. We can see Julius in Berlin.’
Miraculously, another step appeared from the sea. It was slippery and shrouded in weed, but it was still a step.
‘I despise fascism,’ Clio said stiffly, ‘and all that Hitler stands for.’
‘How can you despise what you have never seen?’
‘But I would so much like to see Julius.’ It came to her that she wanted her twin more than anything or anyone in the world.
‘Come, then. It’s quite simple.’
‘Shall I?’
Grace unclasped th
eir hands and held out her right, palm sideways. ‘Shake on it?’
The old formula of schoolroom pacts, often broken.
‘All right then, I will.’
They shook hands, solemnly.
Fourteen
Clio’s first impression of Berlin from the window of her sleeping car in the dim early morning was of a city that turned within itself, denying the daylight. As the train crept into the heart of it she glimpsed the ends of brown streets and the corners of squares lying in shadow under brick and iron arches and hidden between the angles of tall brown buildings.
The little light that did penetrate seemed to have filtered first through peat, or tobacco, or coffee, and so become thickened and stained. It did no more than lick the upsides of the ponderous buildings here and there with washes of paler umber and khaki, intensifying the depths of shadows alongside. Sometimes there were stretches of water visible through the gloom, a canal like a ribbon made of the dun sky and then a wider expanse, a lake the colour of chocolate, fringed with the skeletons of trees.
Then the train rattled over a viaduct and a level crossing and she found herself looking up the great open curve of a broad, deserted street, with tramrails fading away in a silvered arc and gas lights still burning as bronze haloes in the ochre fog of the air.
The sleeping car was unheated. As she stood with her face pressed close to the glass her breath made another fine layer of mist, and she rubbed it away with her gloved fingers. The train had slowed almost to walking pace. She saw the ends of apartment blocks with uncurtained windows and yellow lights showing in the murk, a baker’s shop with the mud-brown shutters coming down ready for the day, and an old man with a metal drum on wheels into which he swept the night’s debris from the gutter.
Grace came back from the tiny washroom at the end of the car. She was fully dressed, down to her furs and ankle boots.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked Clio, rhetorically. Clio had been awake most of the night, shivering under a layer of clothes, listening to Grace’s even breathing. She had been cold for so long that it seemed hardly worth remarking on it.
