by Rosie Thomas
‘I know about my father. I found out the truth.’
Grace was caught, half turned in her chair. ‘What do you know?’
Cressida leant over her shoulder and snatched up the framed photograph of Anthony. She held it against her chest with her arms crossed over it.
‘I know he isn’t my real father, even though I loved him. Pilgrim is, isn’t he?’
‘Pilgrim?’
Grace was numb with fear and shock. It was unthinkable that the secret should swim up now, out of the depths she had consigned it to. She could only repeat Pilgrim’s name, like a fool, like a criminal.
Grace’s reaction would have told Cressida everything, even if she had not known it already. She had never seen any emotion reflected so clearly in her mother’s face as she saw this flash of guilty fear.
Cressida felt her world shifting on its axis. Giddily, she confronted the new perspectives that were revealed. Her mother was vulnerable. She wielded new power herself; she was no longer a child, even to Grace, who had always made her feel younger and more inadequate than she truly was.
‘Who told you?’ Grace whispered.
‘It doesn’t matter. I know, that’s all that’s important. Why did you do it?’ Cressida jerked her chin at the room and the abrupt gesture took in the rest of the house, the shell that held their lives. ‘It makes all this seem like a lie. All the way back, to when I was a baby.’
Desperately Grace tried to reassure her. ‘No, it doesn’t. There’s no lie. I loved your father, and he loved me. And you were his great pride, every day of his life.’
Cressida was afraid that she would cry. It was important that Grace should not see her cry, not at this moment when the notion of power was so finely balanced between them. She concentrated on her anger instead, rubbing at it as if it were a brass kettle that she could cloud with her breath and then polish to a shine with her sleeve.
‘You never even let me say goodbye to him. You made me go away, and then he was dead.’
Resentment of that was like a black hole buried in her heart. What would everything have been like ever since, Cressida wondered, if she had been able to take her leave of Anthony?
‘Cress, listen. That was a terrible day, can’t you understand? He was dying and you were only a little girl.’
‘He thought I was his daughter.’
Only the young could be so cruel, Grace remembered. She had possessed that cruelty once herself.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
Cressida knew that the balance was tipping towards her, and it was both fearsome and intoxicating. What she did and said now, she sensed, might alter the configuration of everything that was to come. She hesitated, and then saw again in her mind’s eye how Grace had put her papers to one side, with a tiny show of impatience, to let Cressida know that she was interrupting higher things.
There was the heat behind her eyes again, and the unconsidered words.
‘Being sorry won’t undo anything that is already done, good or bad. All we can do is remember it.’
Suddenly Cressida found that she was shouting. There was no chance of choosing the phrases now.
‘I remember. I remember all the times you were too busy to talk to me, all the times you made me feel stupid, and too fat, and a chore and a burden and an embarrassment. There was a tiny little surface attempt at being a mother, wasn’t there? I used to see you putting it on like a lipstick. “Cressy, darling, do you think those gloves with that frock?” “Cressy, don’t you want to be friends with any girls of your own age?” But it was all a bore for you, wasn’t it, and it came out as a sneer and a criticism, every day, for all of my life.’
The accusations spilt out of her.
Once she had begun, it seemed, she did not know how to stop herself.
There was every sin of omission and negligence that Grace had ever committed as a mother, significant and trivial, all of them mixed together, a catalogue that was both rending and ridiculous. Cressida’s face turned dull crimson and she held the photograph of Anthony pressed against her as if it might save her life. The words poured out until she was breathless and she had to stop at last, panting and rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand.
Only when she finally faltered into silence was she able to see Grace clearly again. She looked suddenly as she might do when she was old and ugly, if it were possible to imagine that anything of the kind might descend on her beautiful mother.
They faced each other then. The only sound was Cressida’s small gasps for breath.
Grace’s mouth moved, trying to form an answer. She did not know even how to begin to make a defence against the flood of bitterness. Cressida’s outburst had been uncontrolled and the words had been ill-chosen, but Cressida was immature and there was also the thread of cruelty in her that Grace recognized because it had been hers as much as it was now Cressida’s. And for all the rage and the wildness, and the confusion of trivial details with major issues, there was a core of truth in everything that she had said.
‘Yes,’ was all Grace said at last, an acknowledgement. With an insight that had never been granted to her before she could see all the way into Cressida, to her implacable hurt, and she knew that she was the cause of it.
The truth was, Grace understood, that all the love she had ever felt for Cressida had been caught up with guilt for the circumstances of her conception, and grief for Anthony. There was regret for the family that had never properly existed, and a marriage that was hardly begun. All through her childhood Cressida had been a living reminder of Grace’s losses and deceptions, and caught in the net of her own concerns Grace had never found the language by which to express the love instead of her disappointment.
She reached out and gently folded Cressida’s fingers away from the silver rim of Anthony’s photograph. She slid it out of her hands and replaced it on the desk. When she looked into his eyes he seemed diminished, receded into the past behind a tiny smiling mask where she could no longer reach him even in her memory. Anthony was gone, and now Julius had followed him.
From Anthony’s face she turned to Cressida’s. She read defiance in it. It was too late, she recognized with infinite sadness, to be a mother to her daughter. The losses piled against each other, rearing up like monuments.
‘What now?’ Grace asked her.
‘I don’t want to live here any longer. If it could be arranged, I would like to go to live in Oxford, with Clio and Romy.’
Of course. It must be Clio who had told her. The betrayal of trust, after eighteen years.
‘I think I’d be happy there. Clio loves me.’
‘But I love you too,’ Grace cried out. The words came easily, whereas she might have imagined them being torn out of her. They were in any case too late. Cressida seemed hardly to hear them.
‘I like Oxford. Perhaps I could work there, do something useful.’
Grace saw how it would be. There was Clio in her little house in Paradise Square, earth-mothering with Romy and tending the shrine for Rafael Wolf. And there Cressida would be too, happy in the virtuous domestic simplicity of Clio’s household.
Clio had a daughter of her own, and yet she would steal Grace’s.
Clio had always had Jake and Julius, bound to her by the indissoluble ties of blood instead of the brittle bonds of sex. Now, by some black art, she was undoing the blood tie that should have worked against her, and taking Cressida away.
Clio and Rafael did not deserve what Grace had tried to do for them, even if it had only been the small and pleasurable exercise of power and influence. They would probably never even know about it.
Grace flinched. She was beaten by a terrible hammer-blow of emotion, stronger than any feeling she had ever known.
I hate you, the blood in her veins whispered. I hate you now, because Cressida loves you, and I will always hate you.
‘What do you think?’ Cressida asked. She was almost conciliatory at last, recognizing her victory.
‘I don’t know. I
don’t want you to go.’
‘I know that.’
There was the exercise of the new power, absolute and unsoftened. Grace acknowledged it with a small, submissive shrug.
‘I could ask Clio.’
Cressida seemed to be waiting. Obediently Grace lifted the telephone receiver and dialled the operator. A message would have to be relayed from the Woodstock Road. Clio did not have a telephone of her own in Paradise Square. But after a brief conversation Grace replaced the receiver on its hook.
‘Uncle Nathaniel says that Clio has just gone up to North Wales. She has gone to pack up Julius’s belongings.’
She remembered his rooms in Berlin: the few clothes, neatly folded; books and music; almost nothing else.
Cressida nodded. ‘When she comes back, then.’ She touched her mother’s shoulder lightly, finding a generosity at the end that was only just tainted with irony. Then she went, closing the door behind her.
Grace lowered her head and folded her arms on the desk to make a cradle for it. She lay with her eyes closed, thinking.
Clio was in Wales, touching the last links that Julius had left.
Grace needed to see the place too. The cottage and its associations drew her, strongly and then irresistibly. They were hers as much as they were Clio’s. She began to calculate. It was Wednesday. She had planned to travel to Stretton on Friday evening, for a weekend of constituency business. How much further to North Wales? The route seemed to unravel in front of her, beckoning her onwards. Not much further. Two or three hours more driving? She could leave in the morning.
As soon as Grace had thought of it, the decision was made.
Clio woke up the next morning to the sound of wind and driving rain. With the blankets still wrapped around her she went to the window and looked out towards the sea. The water and the sky were indistinguishable. They rolled towards the house, a single grey mass shot with random gashes of livid light. The marsh-grasses were flattened by the vicious wind.
Shivering a little, Clio opened a drawer in the chest and took out a thick, darned sweater of Julius’s. She pulled it on over her slept-in clothes. Then she went down to the primitive kitchen and lit the gas under a saucepan of water. When it was heated she splashed her face at the stained sink, and made herself a pot of tea. She drank the tea without milk, sitting in the old armchair with her fingers laced around the cup for warmth.
She sat for a long time, thinking of Julius.
It had been right to come here. She could feel him close to her, and some of her suffering began to abate. She wandered around the small room, carefully collecting together the scattered music sheets and laying them on top of the piano. Julius’s bust of Mozart stood on the deep sill of one of the windows. Clio lifted it up and took her brother’s coat off its hook to wrap it in for the journey to Oxford.
Clio went upstairs and opened the drawers of the chest. She took out Julius’s few clothes and folded them into tidy piles on the bed. The rain eased while she was working and the wind dropped a little, but the cottage was still filled with the swell and rattle of the weather. The knock at the front door became a rhythmic banging before Clio heard it and separated it from the complaints of the cottage’s fabric.
When she pulled back the huge wooden bolt and swung the door open, she saw an old man waiting on the threshold. He was tiny and bent, dressed in brown clothes worn shiny and belted at the waist with hairy string. He was wearing wellingtons and a flat tweed cap stained the same colour as his coat, and when he peered up at Clio she saw that his face was brown too, and creased with exposure to the wind. He looked like some thorn tree bent over on the marsh.
‘Morning to you,’ the man said.
‘Good morning,’ Clio said wonderingly.
‘This here’s Mr Hirsh’s dog, see?’
The black-and-white collie sat beside him, held on a makeshift leash of the same hairy string. It whined a little and then yawned, lapping its chops with its tongue.
‘My brother’s dog?’ As she spoke, Clio remembered. Julius had written about a dog. His name was Gelert. She stooped down and patted its rough coat and the dog whined again in response. ‘Good boy,’ she said softly.
‘You must be the farmer?’ She looked up at the little man.
He jerked his head sideways towards the marsh. ‘Sheep.’
‘Won’t you come in? I know you … found my brother. I’d like to say thank you for what you did for him.’
‘Only what anyone would have done, isn’t it? Sad thing. I liked what I seen of him. Which wasn’t much, mind.’
Clio held the door open wider. ‘Please won’t you come in?’
The farmer shook his head. ‘Weather,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘What about the dog, then?’
The dog had been Julius’s. The rough black-and-white bundle was another link with him. Clio held out her hand for the loop of string.
‘Here, Gelert. Come on, boy.’
The dog needed no second invitation. He bounded over the threshold and made for the space in front of the hearth.
‘Thank you.’ Clio turned back to the farmer, but he had pulled at the greasy peak of his cap and was already trudging away down the track towards the gate. Clio shut the door against the wind and saw that the dog was settled in what must be his accustomed place. He rested his head on his paws and watched her.
The time passed slowly, marked by a just detectable strengthening of the light outside that almost immediately began fading again as soon as she had noticed it. In the early afternoon Clio realized that she was hungry. As soon as she went to the door the dog sprang up and followed her eagerly. She let it out and it ran in circles around her as she walked to the barn. The keys of Julius’s Morris Eight were still in the ignition. The dog jumped in with her and sat in the passenger seat.
The cottage was less isolated that it seemed. A mile or so inland past the farm there was a struggling village of grey stone houses strung out along the road. The mountains were more clearly visible from here, a strong dark rib of them rising out of the coastal plain with the higher peaks like shadows cast behind the foothills. Clio went into the village shop and bought provisions for herself and food for the dog. As she was driving back the rain doubled its intensity. The single wiper could not cope with the force of it and she had to drive with her face almost pressed against the streaming windscreen.
When she came out of the barn with her arms full of shopping, wind and salt-laden rain beat into her mouth and eyes. Clio ducked her head and ran for the cottage. The sea seemed much closer; she supposed it must be high water. The thunder of the waves against the sea-wall was clearly audible.
Clio was sitting in the armchair again, in front of a fire that she had lit with dry wood from the barn, when a sound made her lift her head. The dog sat upright, its muscles quivering.
There was a car coming down the track. They could hear the engine, and the wheels sending out arcs of spray from the huge miry puddles. The car stopped, close to the house. For all the noise of the weather, a silence seemed to descend.
Clio went to the window, and saw Grace. Her white Aston Martin was slewed off to the side of the track with mud splashed over its long bonnet. She came through the rain towards the house, with the sea swelling behind her like a great grey bruise.
A moment later she was on the threshold, holding up her gloved hand to shield herself from the weather.
‘Aren’t you going to let me in?’ Grace said to Clio.
Clio wanted to answer, No, never, but she stood aside and let the door open just wide enough to admit her.
‘Why are you here?’ Clio asked her. Her voice sounded as it had done when they were children, quarrelling on the beach or in the Stretton schoolroom.
Grace turned. There was rainwater shining in her hair, and when she shook off her coat dark drops spattered over the stone floor.
‘For the same reasons as you,’ she answered.
‘No.’ Clio had shouted before she even realized that
she was going to. Her body shook with the intensity of her denial. ‘I don’t want you here. You don’t belong here, this is Julius’s place.’
Grace’s clothes were crumpled from the long drive. She took off her suede gauntlets, very slowly, revealing her scarlet-painted nails. ‘And so, therefore, I do belong in it. You are not the only claimant to his memory, Clio.’
Clio saw a red haze of anger and hatred, netted with the dark patterns of veins like a tree against a sunset. Her fists clenched and the nails bit deep into her palms.
‘It is because of you that he is dead.’
Grace paused. It struck her suddenly, as it had not done for a long time, how Clio’s features mirrored her own. It was like talking to a reflection of herself, only her face looked back at her full of hate and rage.
‘No, I believe that Julius is dead because of Julius. I never lied to him, you know. I never promised that I could give him any more than I actually gave. And I loved him, whatever you may choose to believe.’
‘Oh Grace, I know that. And I know the destructive power of your love because I have seen it all my life.’
Clio went back and hunched beside Gelert in front of the fire. She threw two more logs on to the flames, and a shower of sparks whirled in the black mouth of the chimney.
‘Is there anything to drink?’ Grace asked.
‘Water. Milk.’
‘I’ve got some whisky in the car.’
She went out, letting a whirl of cold air into the room, and came back with a bottle of Vat 69. Clio heard her rattling in the kitchen. When Grace leant over her shoulder with a cup she reached up automatically and took it. The spirit burnt in her throat and made her cough. She sat on the floor and drew up her knees, resting her head on her folded arms. The rough knit of Julius’s sweater scraped her cheek, and she caught the faint smell of him lingering in its folds.
Behind her, she sensed Grace prowling through the room with her own cup of whisky cradled in her hand. The thought of her touching Julius’s belongings, even moving through the place where he had been, made the hair at the nape of Clio’s neck prickle with cold. She gazed into the flames and at the faces they revealed while Gelert stirred next to her and stretched his paws voluptuously to the warmth of the fire.
