All My Sins Remembered

by Rosie Thomas

  She paused at the open doors that led into the ballroom. She saw Eleanor waltzing in Nathaniel’s arms, and Blanche with Thomas, and as she watched them the colours of the ball-dresses and the flowers and the women’s jewels all seemed to blur together.

  For an instant the ballroom became as complete and lovely as an impressionist painting, firmly fixed in its evanescent moment and resistant to closer scrutiny, because when she stared harder at it the perfection broke up once again into its component dots of dancers and flowers and candles in their sconces, and the picture in its completeness was lost to her again.

  Clio stood still, blinking a little. As she surveyed this celebration of privilege and counted herself a part of it, she felt no rush of anger that it should be allowed to happen whilst in Europe Jews were being dispossessed and beaten and murdered by the Nazis.

  Only ten days earlier, Hitler had invaded Prague. Clio lived with her fears and prayers for Rafael, and with her hatred of the evil that had taken away their life together. But she also knew that tonight was one of the pillars supporting the world she had lived in for most of her life. When the celebration was over, this one and all the others like it, the people would do what was necessary to be done.

  The war would come. Those who had been pro-Munich were now no longer in favour, even Grace and her Cliveden friends. Grace was fervently anti-Hitler now.

  Clio smiled a thin smile.

  It was the faces of the young boys that caught her attention, the eighteen-year-olds who were waltzing with girls in white dresses. The thread of melancholy seemed only to emphasize the glitter, and to make the brightness brighter still.

  There was someone standing beside her, Clio realized. She looked, and saw that it was Jake again. He made her open her beaded bag and show him her card.

  ‘No dances at all? Not a single one booked?’

  Clio laughed and protested. ‘I’m far too old for this. Go and dance with Cressida.’

  The tiny pencil attached to the card swung at the end of its tasselled silver cord. Where was Cressida?

  ‘I want to dance with you. May I have the pleasure?’

  He wrote his initials on the correct line. JNH. It made Clio think of the old desk and the penknife carvings. Was the desk still here somewhere? How long ago it was.

  Jake thought, I have never even danced with Lottie. He could imagine the muscled warmth of her turning and humming in his arms. His eyes closed, and her face swam in front of him. He wondered how it was that he could go on sleepwalking through these days and nights.

  ‘Penny for them?’ Clio asked, as they had asked each other when they were children.

  ‘Topping band, isn’t it?’ Jake smiled at her.

  Julius put down his sheet of manuscript. He had been sitting with it on his lap for a long time, but he had not written anything. The fire had burnt low and then died in a heap of cold ash. He was cold; he felt too chilled even to stand up and go through the mechanical business of rekindling it. There were no logs left in the basket, and the old boy from across the fields who had brought the last load hadn’t called for two days. Two days, was it, or much longer than that?

  He drew his coat around him instead. The smallest movement required an effort of will that was almost beyond his capability. On the rag rug in front of the dead fire the dog stirred and then lifted its head to look at him. The creature had given up hope that Julius might take him outside and let him run over the sheep-bitten turf towards the sea-wall. He lay still, whining occasionally, the whites of his eyes showing when he yawned and shivered.

  Julius shifted again and looked across at the window. He did not know if he had fallen asleep or if in his solitude he had forgotten how to distinguish the passage of time. It seemed that at one moment there was daylight outside, and the next there was the grey-purple threat of darkness. The repetitive cycle of the hours pressed on him like a weight.

  The wind was rising. He could hear it whipping inland, unimpeded, towards the dour mountains. The wail drowned out the music in his head, but the sound of the wind with all the implacable and majestic associations of the natural world came too late to be a comfort to him. He had tried to harness the music and to transmit it through the orderly systems of notation. It had defied him, shrieking ever more loudly, until its crescendo made him press his hands to his ears and rock, forwards and backwards, wishing for nothing more than to be left in silence. And now even as he listened to it, the wind and the music became part of each other.

  Julius stumbled to his feet. The dog jumped up at once and stood stiff-legged, with his head cocked. He barked once, and then ran to the window. He leapt at it and strained with his forepaws against the glass.

  ‘Gelert, boy,’ Julius said.

  He walked through into the tiny kitchen and saw that the dog’s bowl was empty. He ran fresh water into it from the single cold tap and then opened the door of the stone pantry that led off the kitchen. The dog came behind him and lapped noisily at the bowl. The shelf in the pantry was bare except for the heel of a loaf and some cold mutton and a covered bowl of dripping. Julius took a tin plate and, working carefully and methodically, he crumbled the bread and then sliced the meat on top of it. He used the blade of the knife to scoop the dripping out of the bowl and mash it into the heap of meat and bread.

  Then he carried the piled-up plate into the kitchen and put it on the floor beside the water bowl. The dog ate some of the food while Julius watched, and then sat back on its haunches, looking up at him.

  ‘Good boy,’ Julius said gently.

  He went back into the main room of the cottage. There was an upright piano against one wall, with torn sheets of music manuscript scattered on the floor around it. Julius’s violin lay on the piano in its closed case. He lifted it up and held it in one hand, looking around the room as if searching for somewhere else for it to rest. There was nowhere, and so he stooped to put it down on the chair in front of the fire. He unclasped his fingers from the handle very slowly. The violin case sat upright in his place, like an abstract of himself.

  The windows and ceilings in the cottage were too low for a man of Julius’s height, but as he straightened up he could see directly out of the window across the marsh in the direction of the sea. It was almost dark now. There was only a thin greenish line marking the horizon, and above it the impression of weighty clouds rolling in towards the land.

  Julius took an old jacket off a hook. As soon as he clicked up the latch of the outside door the dog bounded in from the kitchen and raced out into the darkness. Julius followed him, and in the gloom he could just see the white patches of his coat as he sprang away towards the sea.

  The air was laden with salt. A recollection stirred, and he groped for it in the disorder within himself. Then with a sudden clarity he remembered summer holidays, a beach in Norfolk and a little canvas pavilion with a red pennant fluttering above it. There was the rowing boat, and then Grace, lying on the sand with her wet clothes moulded to her body.

  Julius’s shivering had become a convulsive shudder. The spasms twisted his shoulders and jarred his bones. The wind seemed to cut into him now, driving him backwards towards the little house and whatever waited for him within it. He took one more step, and then faltered, and then he swung round so the cottage loomed in front of him. A single square of yellow light showed in the lower window, drawing him on.

  As he crept back he thought briefly about Stretton. He could imagine the music, dance music, not the clamour that filled his head. He wondered if Clio was dancing, and Grace, always Grace, with her hand resting lightly on her partner’s shoulder. Her head would be tilted a little to one side, as she listened to whatever it was he was saying.

  When he reached the cottage again Julius went into the kitchen and picked up the half-eaten plate of food. He put it outside, on the rough ground, so the dog would find it if he came back. Then he retreated again. He closed the door, and turned the heavy old key in the lock.

  Clio danced with Jake, and then with Tho
mas and a handful of Stretton cousins and neighbours whom she had known since she was a child. The ballroom was still a sea of changing colours that wove patterns and figures for her pleasure. It was exhilarating to dance in this warm, shining space with the company of friends around her.

  But towards midnight she felt suddenly restless. The heat from the dancers and the candles seemed to fall across her like a smothering weight; her hair was damp over her forehead and at the nape of her neck. But at the same time she shivered, as if a cold draught had penetrated the brilliant room.

  She excused herself to her latest partner and slipped away from the dancing. She wandered slowly through the house. The ball was at its height; couples wound up and down the great staircase under the family portraits and sat out in the firelit and scented rooms from which all the dust-sheets and -covers had been stripped off and bundled away. It made Clio happy to see Stretton alive again.

  Blanche had been right, she thought. She had made Hugo agree to sell two paintings, a Canaletto and a Lely, to pay for this week of celebrations. Hugo had demurred, but Blanche had insisted. In the end the pictures were sold, and so it was all done as it should be done. There was the new Countess in her wedding dress and her diamonds, and the footmen with their powdered hair, and the hundreds of guests. The great house contained them, serene and magnificent, as it was meant to be.

  As it was meant to be tonight. After tonight, how many more evenings like this one would there be?

  Clio shivered again. A cold finger touched her spine. The division between her happiness and her fear was so fine that she felt herself vibrate between the twin magnetic poles, an oscillation so fine as to be invisible, but she was still possessed by it. She saw all the brightness of tonight, and even as she looked into its lovely face she saw another reflection, a mirror image, where the soft flesh had peeled away to show the terrible and savage bone beneath.

  She caught her breath and looked behind her, as if the embodiment of her fears might stalk her through the golden glow of the ball. But there were only smiling faces, familiar and unfamiliar, pink with champagne and the exertions of dancing and pleasure. There was no skull-face visible in the crowd.

  The doors of the salon stood open on to the terrace. A marquee had been erected on the smooth grass below and an awning covered the stone steps leading down to it. Clio passed out of the terrace doors and under the awning. There were round tables set out in the marquee and hired staff were busy here, under the eye of the butler, preparing to serve supper. A noisy party of what looked like Phoebe’s friends was already in possession of one of the tables. Clio wandered out again, sensing the movement of the evening around her like a tide. She stepped aside, from beneath the shelter of the awning, to look up at the front of the house. The stone shimmered under the floodlights and the windows gave back their own light.

  When she turned to look out into the blackness of the park she felt that the house was a liner sailing in some dark sea.

  Cressida had been sitting at the far end of the terrace, huddled on one of the mossy stone seats in a semi-circular niche. When she saw Clio standing alone with her face turned out to the darkness she jumped up and ran towards her. The hem of her golden-yellow bridesmaid’s dress brushed over the paving. The clipping of her satin slippers as she hurried sounded remote, as if even her footsteps belonged to someone else.

  ‘Cressida? Is that you?’ Clio was startled. ‘How long have you been out here?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember how long.’

  Clio looked at her. ‘Aren’t you frozen with cold? With only that thin wrap?’

  Cressida repeated, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’ Then she laughed, a jagged laugh that was too old for her, without any humour in it. ‘I don’t know anything at all. What can you tell me, Clio?’

  Clio looked harder at her. She remembered how Cressida had emptied her champagne glass at the dinner table in one swallow. There must have been several more glasses since then.

  ‘Come inside with me, now,’ she said gently.

  Cressida followed her meekly enough. When they stepped into the salon she shrank in the blaze of light and then half turned back towards the shelter of the darkness. Clio could see that she had been crying. There were tear-marks in the dusting of face-powder that Grace had permitted her to apply.

  ‘You need to come and get warm, darling. See, your teeth are chattering.’

  Cressida felt as if the eyes of every one of the overdressed and raucous people in the room were fixed on her. She muttered, ‘Can we go somewhere? Away from all this stupid show?’

  ‘Of course we can. Come up to my bedroom and we’ll sit by the fire.’

  For once there were enough servants in the house for fires to have been lit in all the bedroom grates. Amongst Clio’s more vivid recent memories of Stretton were bedtimes so cold that frost flowers bloomed on the insides of the windows.

  They passed beneath the portrait of the Misses Holborough. It had been cleaned especially for the ball, and the innocent identical faces looked as fresh as they had done when Sargent painted them. Clio glanced up at it, and by automatic reaction at the opposite and corresponding empty space. Cressida kept her swollen eyes fixed grimly on the floor.

  When they reached her bedroom Clio went straight to the tallboy and took out a thick woollen cardigan. Tabby had knitted it for her. She put it around Cressida’s shoulders, wondering at the same time if Tabby was dancing or if she had managed to extricate herself and achieve the no doubt longed-for sanctuary of her own bedroom.

  ‘Sit down here,’ Clio commanded. There was a little sofa beside the fire.

  Cressida sat, and at once shaded her eyes with her hands.

  ‘I thought I would drink some champagne and be delicious fun and dance and flirt like all the others,’ she muttered.

  The other débutantes, Clio supposed.

  ‘All I feel is sick.’

  ‘Are you going to be sick?’

  Cressida shook her head. ‘Clio, can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course you can. Anything you like.’

  Some question about love, or sex. What had Grace told her, or omitted to tell her?

  Cressida’s head was bent. Clio saw that there was a tiny dark blot on the glowing folds of her full skirt, and then a second one spread beside it. Cressida was crying again. Her weeping seemed worse for its very silence. Clio left her seat and knelt on the floor in front of her. She tried to take her hands between her own, but Cressida’s arms were rigid and the fingers still shielded her eyes.

  ‘What is it you wanted to ask me?’

  Cressida took a breath. The question had reverberated within her head for so long, and now she wasn’t sure if she could bring it out into the plain world of matter-of-fact enquiry and response.

  Clio waited patiently.

  At last, roughly and without lifting her head, Cressida said, ‘Who is my real father? My father, or Pilgrim?’

  In the silence that followed they could hear the music of the band like a whisper or an echo.

  When Clio couldn’t answer her because there was no breath in her lungs, Cressida did look up, and then demanded, ‘Well?’

  Clio knew that her silence was as clear an indication of the truth as any words could be. She began, stumblingly, hoping that shock would pass for surprise, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean. What exactly are you asking me?’

  It seemed inconceivable that Grace could have given Cressida any cause for suspicion, even inadvertently. She had spent eighteen years shielding her secret, and she had done it so effectively that it was a long time since Clio or Jake or Julius had so much as thought about the old bloodlines. Cressida was Anthony’s daughter.

  ‘You are your father’s daughter.’

  Cressida’s face twisted. ‘Yes. But which father?’

  Clio thought of Romy, lying asleep in the next room, with her fist held up to her round cheek. Romy was a child, who could be told stories of her father so that
he would stay alive in her memory. But Cressida was not a child any longer; what story could Clio tell her?

  She said, ‘I think you should ask Grace that, not me.’

  ‘I don’t want to ask Grace. I don’t talk to Grace about anything except my Season, and which dress I should wear, and what behaviour is suitable and what is not.’

  There was a flatness in her refusal that convinced Clio that it was not Grace who had put the suspicion into her head. And although Cressida’s complaint used the same limited words that any privileged girl of her generation might have used about her mother, there was a different pain behind it. Clio had observed Grace and Cressida over the years, and she could guess at some of the distance that lay between them.

  Not for Romy and me, she vowed again.

  ‘I want you to tell me,’ Cressida said.

  There was the faint echo of music once more. Clio saw that the fire was burning low. She reached for the little brass scuttle and shook out some coal. She had never learned that she was supposed to ring for the maid.

  ‘Anthony or Pilgrim? Please, Clio. I can see that you know. Once I’m certain we needn’t ever talk about it again. It’s not being sure, don’t you see that?’ Cressida was urgent now. Her tears had dried up.

  Clio looked at her. Her hand still rested on the polished handle of the coal scuttle. She would either have to lie, or tell the truth.

  ‘Pilgrim,’ she said.

  Cressida breathed in, a sharp snatch of air, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time. But then she leant back, folding her hands in her lap to cover the tear-marks on her dress. She nodded, quite calmly, as if she was relieved.

  ‘Yes. He told me so.’

  I would like to kill him, Clio thought.

  ‘What else did he tell you?’

  Cressida made a small movement, to indicate that there was nothing else, or nothing that could be as important as the single fact.