by Rosie Thomas
Grace stood at one of the tiny windows and stooped to look out. It was dark, and there was nothing to see of the marsh and the sea-wall or the clouds and the incessant rain. The roar of the waves seemed to fill her head out of nowhere. She broke away from the window and dragged an upright chair from its place against the wall so that she could sit down in front of the fire.
Grace and Clio sat in silence, not looking at one another, drinking their whisky out of Julius’s cups. The wind and the rain locked them into the close space together.
Grace tipped back the last of her whisky and reached for the bottle again. Clio heard the little snick of her lighter as she lit a cigarette. Grace asked harshly, ‘Why did you tell Cressida that Pilgrim is her father?’
Clio did not lift her head. The pictures in the fire hypnotized her. ‘I didn’t tell her. Pilgrim did.’
‘When?’
‘When we were in Berlin. The last time. When you were with Julius, before Alice died.’
Grace considered.
‘You seem to be a part of it, just the same. The conspiracy with Cressida, against me.’
‘There is no conspiracy.’
‘She asked me if she could come to Oxford and live with you, because you love her.’ Grace blew a plume of smoke between her teeth, tasting the bitterness. ‘As if I did not, do not.’
‘She asked me too. I told her that she must stay with you, because you are her mother. She also asked me about her father, because Pilgrim had told her and she did not know whether she could believe him or not. She needed the truth, and I confirmed it.’
Grace exhaled again, a long breath. ‘So.’
It seemed that there was nothing else to say. The hostility between them yawned, dark and ugly as an open wound.
The fire burnt low and Clio threw more logs on to the red embers. The wind sank to a single note that blew through the crumbling slates overhead.
Julius seemed close to each of them, a troubled shadow, fretted and made restless by their division.
At last, Clio went into the kitchen and put together the elements of a rudimentary meal. She took Julius’s books off the table and laid two places, facing each other, the parody of a domestic tableau. She set out the cold food, and went to the dresser for two plates. As clearly as if it was still propped up where he had left it, she saw Julius’s letter, and Grace’s name on it. She took the plates from the shelf and they rattled in her shaking hands.
Grace watched her.
When they sat down facing one another Grace said, ‘You can read the letter if you want to. It’s here in my handbag.’
They were like Eleanor and Blanche now, looking into one another’s heads without the need for words, but the visions that danced and sprang before their eyes were neither benign nor reassuring.
Clio took the letter and unfolded it.
Jake had forwarded it to Grace, unopened and without comment. When Grace slit open the plain envelope and read Julius’s words, she was powerfully reminded of the letters that Jake had written to her long ago, from the field hospital in France. There was the same eloquence. The fear came from deep within him, and he was unable to express it in music or in words. The brief sentences were disjointed, barely making sense. Except for the last line.
Julius had written, ‘I love you, Grace. Remember this.’
Clio read in her turn:
I can hear music and it makes me afraid.
This was once my language, and I can no longer understand it. I see holes and spaces where there were once pleasant structures. Is this what it means to reach an ending?
I am afraid of solitude and I am alone.
I can see absence and darkness, nothing else. Shall I be forgiven for my quietus?
The bare bodkin.
The music goes on, on and on, unstoppable. Silence is welcome.
At the end of the page she saw, I love you, Grace. Remember this.
Clio folded the thin sheet of paper and put it back into the envelope. Jealousy bit her for the last time. She had always wanted Julius’s love for herself. He was her twin, the good half, and now he was gone for ever.
Grace had taken him away.
It was her final act of malice and destruction to come here, to the place where he had died. While she was alone Clio had dreamed for herself out of the marshes and the old stone walls an image of Julius calm and at peace. Now, because of Grace, she had to see the truth. He was lonely and tormented, and he had preferred to die.
The cottage was filled with the memories of him, and with loss and grief.
Grace took the letter back and the jaws of her handbag snapped shut on it.
Clio stood up abruptly, the legs of her chair making a harsh scrape on the stone floor. She carried her untouched plate back to the kitchen and dropped the contents into Gelert’s bowl. Grace sat on in her place, smoking her long cigarettes and drinking whisky.
The evening had drained away. At the foot of the steep stairs Clio said, ‘There is only one bedroom here. One bed.’
Grace did not look round. ‘I will sleep in the armchair. Just for tonight.’
Clio went up the steep twist of the stairs and lay down again with the blankets wrapped around her. This time she did not sleep so easily. She listened to the wind, and imagined Grace in the chair downstairs, smoking and staring into the dying fire with the dog at her feet.
Grace sat, with her head thrown back and her hands loosely dangling over the arms. She was full of memories. She thought of Berlin, and the heat of Julius’s body joined to hers came back to her.
They woke to a world that swelled with water. Rain leaked and dripped and bubbled all around them. The sea had darkened from grey to almost black, and the greasy crests of the waves whipped sullenly into the sea-wall.
The two women were stiff and cold but still the little cottage held on to them. They stalked each other through the tiny rooms, held captive by the weather and by their jealous guard over the shadows that remained.
Clio went carefully about the task of packing Julius’s belongings. She ran out into the rain with the small bundles in her arms, and stowed them into the back of the Morris Eight. She laid the bust of Mozart, wrapped in Julius’s coat, in the passenger seat.
‘I’ll be going this afternoon,’ Grace said watching her. ‘I’m at Stretton tonight, and seeing constituents all day tomorrow.’
Clio nodded. She longed to have the house to herself again, for the few hours before she must leave in her turn.
She left Julius’s music to the last. She came back from her final trip to the barn and the car and shook the rain out of her hair, just as the dog had done when she let him out earlier. He sat beside the door now, sniffing the wet air and swishing his tail over the flagstones. He had been restless all day.
‘Gelert, boy.’ Clio bent to soothe him. She was reconciled to the idea of taking him back to Paradise Square; she had already imagined how she would lead him up to the front door and surprise Romy.
The sound of the piano made her head jerk up.
Grace was standing with her back to her. She had lifted the lid to expose the yellowing keys, and the sheets of Julius’s music were spread out around her. She was following the lines of his notation with one red fingernail, and idly picking out the chords with her left hand. The notes stretched and faded in the thick air.
To Clio it seemed that Grace was picking for amusement in Julius’s exposed heart.
She ran across the room and tore the music away, then slammed down the piano lid so that Grace had to snatch her hand back. The keys rattled their faint protest.
The two of them confronted each other. In that second their white faces were identical, but there was no one to see them and remark on it. Clio’s fist had whirled up and it seemed for a moment that she would strike out. They might have fought then, like children, biting and scratching and rolling over and over on the stone floor.
But Grace turned sharply away. The house and its ghost were suddenly unbearably oppressive. She wo
uld go out for an hour and walk Julius’s last territory with his dog for company. And afterwards she would drive away to Stretton. She put on her coat and whistled to the dog, then opened the door that led on to the marshes. The wind whirled into the room again and blew the sheets of music off the piano. Rainspots darkened the flags.
Gelert cringed on the threshold, unwilling to venture out, but Grace saw the length of string that the farmer had brought. She tied it to his collar, and pulled him out with her.
Clio followed across the room and slid the wooden bolt behind them. She went upstairs, with her feet dragging heavily on the angled treads. She looked down from the window that faced the sea and saw Grace marching away. The collie balked and tugged on the string, shrinking from the weather, but Grace held her head up, turning her face into the driving rain.
Clio sat down on the bed. Afterwards, she could not remember how long it was before she looked out of the window again. When she did raise her head, it was to stare at the sea-wall in the distance.
The waves began to lap over the defence. It was high water again. Slowly, almost lazily, the ripples spilt over and were swallowed by the marsh. The universe seemed full of water. There was a long, shivering moment of silence when nothing moved in the sodden world except the idle ripples.
Then the wall split, like the skin of a rotten fruit, and the sea came bursting through it.
At once a great cliff of water, a wave topped with a crest of dirty foam as high as a church, raced over the marshland towards the cottage. Clio watched it, spellbound with fear. In the same instant she saw Grace running ahead of the thundering water, running with her hands outstretched and Julius’s dog like a wolf in front of her.
Clio was frozen. The downstairs door was bolted from within, she had shot the bolt. She would have to open it to let Grace in ahead of the predatory sea, but she only stood at the window, watching her cousin running. The wave was a black wall now, but it moved so fast. Clio did not move.
At last, after an infinity of time chopped into teeming and hurling splinters of memory and longing, Clio whirled away from the window. She threw herself down the dog-leg of the stairs, jarring her bones into flight across the lower room. Her fingers were stretching to the bolt when she heard the terrible drumming of Grace’s fists on the other side.
At once there came an overpowering roar as the flood water surged around the house. The sturdy front door held but a second later the back door was smashed down and the water swirled in. Clio flung herself at the stairs again, clawing herself upwards as the torrent swept beneath her.
She found herself standing at the top of the stairwell, gazing down at the inky swell a few feet below her, her breath sobbing in her throat.
Her hands convulsively mimed the gesture of unbolting the door and throwing it open to let Grace in to safety.
Outside the greedy water swept on, eating the flat land past the farm and up to the road that skirted on the marshes.
When the night came only the upper half of Julius’s cottage was visible, sticking up out of the shifting expanse of the redrawn sea.
The night brought a blackness more hideous than anything Clio had ever known. She crouched in the dark like an animal, feeling it touching her skin and pressing like pennies on her eyelids. She forced her eyes wide open. The noise of the wind and water echoed in her head, and swelled louder, and in front of her staring eyes the same images played over and over. There was the black wall of water, and Grace running with the dog, and then a confusion of smashing waves and pounding fists, and a body swept over and over, and her own blind face, under the skin of the sea.
Ever since the day of the Mabel, Grace had been afraid of the sea and of death by drowning.
At last, after what seemed like an infinity of time but was only in the grey dawn, the rescue boats came. They brought men in waders, carrying torches and ropes. The men came up the stairs and found Clio huddled against the inner wall of the bedroom. They lifted her up, gently and kindly, reassuring her in soft Welsh voices. ‘There now, geneth bach, you are safe now. It’s all over, you are safe now.’
Her white face and staring eyes frightened them, and they saw the little movements that her hands made, to and fro, opening and shutting something that was invisible to them. But she was cold, chilled to her bones, and suffering from shock. She was not hurt, and so she would recover.
Grace’s body was recovered five days later, from the rocks of the Anglesey coast. Gelert was lost to the sea.
Twenty-four
Clio was ill for a long time.
She was taken first to hospital in Wales, and when it was discovered there that she could not eat, or sleep without the aid of medication, she was moved to a special hospital in Oxford where it was thought that the proximity of her parents and daughter might help her eventual recovery. Her doctors and Jake agreed that her collapse was the result of shock, and the stress of another bereavement following so soon after the loss of Julius.
Nathaniel and Eleanor came to see her, always bringing Romy with them. They assured her over and over again that the little girl was safe, and happy with them in the Woodstock Road, because Clio seemed to need their assurances. She would sit silently holding Romy’s hand, watching them all with fear and anxiety in her eyes. After their visits, sitting in the drawing room overlooking the garden with Romy in bed asleep, the elder Hirshes would remind each other that Clio and Grace had been close all their lives. They were born on the same day, and were as much a part of one another as blood twins. It was no wonder that Clio was ill, they said. After everything she had suffered.
The old people tried to concentrate their affection and their hopes on Romy. The three deaths in such close succession had drawn a darkness and fearfulness around them, but they struggled to hide it from Clio. In time they discovered that Jake was right; they were able to submerge some of their own sadness as they watched Romy playing in the now overgrown garden.
No one blamed Clio for her breakdown; all through the weeks of her illness she felt the love and concern of her family gently pressing against the boundaries of her confusion. She was too ill to go to Grace’s quiet funeral at Stretton, nor was she able to attend the grand memorial service at Westminster, at which Grace’s friends, and her political opponents as well as her allies, paid tribute to her determined spirit.
Afterwards, Clio could not remember very much about this time. She was thankful for that. The memories that she did have were of dreams, she knew with hindsight that they must have been dreams, but while she suffered them they were infinitely more real than the hospital ward. She dreamt of water, and faces, and supplicating hands. These horrors came time after time, the same water engulfing her until she feared it so much that she could not turn on a tap to wash her hands, or drink from the beaker on her night table. The hands reached out at her from every shadow and beyond every corner. She folded her own hands into her armpits rather than watch herself fumbling for a bolt that was never drawn back. The faces watched her wherever she went. They were always familiar faces made unfamiliar by their expressions; the features were her own and yet not her own.
There were also visions of punishment. Jailers converged on her and came so close that she cowered away from them before they dissolved and became regiments of teachers and battalions of marching soldiers. She waited in her dreams, wishing for it, whatever it might prove to be, but the threatened punishment was never visited on her.
Then, quite suddenly, she began to recover.
All the time she was ill Clio knew in some recess of her mind that her illness was an occupation that saved her from having to do anything else.
Almost overnight it came to her that doing something was preferable to occupying the limbo of dreams.
From that day onwards, the potency of the visions began to diminish. She began to sleep without needing to swallow pills, and woke up feeling refreshed. The ward she had lived in for weeks became fixed, and no longer dissolved in and out of focus. Its small area reassured her,
and then rapidly became boring and confining. Clio began to take walks in the hospital grounds. She found that spring had turned into a hot summer. Horse chestnut trees spread their shade over mown lawns.
One day Nathaniel brought Romy to see her. Clio sat her daughter on her lap and brushed the mass of fair curls back from the child’s round face.
‘Do you know, Romy, we must do something about your hair?’
She heard herself saying it, and saw Nathaniel looking at her in surprised happiness. Clio twisted a thick rope of hair in her fingers, feeling the springy warmth of it.
‘We could plait it, or braid it like this, couldn’t we? It would make you look so pretty.’
Grete had worn her hair in a braid around her head, the same colour hair. The last letter from Waltersroda had arrived more than a year ago, and after that there had been silence, and no reply to any of Clio’s own letters. Clio could only guess what had happened to Grete and Leopold. Who would wait for Rafael, she thought, if she herself did not?
Clio turned with sudden urgency to her father. She said, ‘I want to come home. When can I come home?’
Nathaniel’s beard was almost completely white, like his hair. He had taken off his old panama hat and it rested beside his chair with his walking stick. He reached out and took Clio’s hand, and held it in his own.
‘When you are ready,’ he told her. ‘When you feel that you want to.’
In another ten days, her doctors agreed that she could be discharged. Clio went home to the Woodstock Road at the beginning of July 1939.
She stayed with Eleanor and Nathaniel for a week. She reabsorbed the sounds and the scents of the old house, moving quietly through the rooms, looking at the shabby furniture and the worn covers. She sat down in front of the open doors that led out on to the balcony, amidst the scent of roses and jasmine, and gazed up at The Janus Face.
