by Rosie Thomas
Nathaniel saw what was the matter, and blamed himself for his insensitivity. ‘Walk by all means, Grace. We will keep pace with you.’
‘Don’t hold back on purpose. Perhaps Jake will walk too, to keep me company?’
‘Good idea. Thank you, Jake,’ Nathaniel said. Julius scrambled into the punt after Clio, without looking round. The twins sat facing each other amongst the piled cushions and Nathaniel stationed himself at the back. He dropped the pole into the water, pushed, and twisted it to lift it free. The punt shot forward and drops of spray scattered concentric circles in its wake.
Grace and Jake began to walk, side by side.
Jake could think of nothing to say, now he had the unthinkable chance of being alone with her, out of earshot of noisy siblings and all the busy demands of the Woodstock Road. He wanted to say everything, to pour out his astonishment that Grace, who was only his cousin and ally, had suddenly turned into an intriguing mystery. He wanted to ask her if she felt the same, to compare and confide, to draw her closer, this unknown Grace. The clumsy words jammed in his head. He could only manage, thickly, ‘It’s all different, all of a sudden. It is, isn’t it?’
Grace seemed calm, as if she understood everything. She nodded her head once, very slowly, ‘Yes. Everything is different.’
‘You’re not just Grace any longer.’
‘Nor are you just Jake.’ Her voice was very low, almost inaudible.
Jake could hardly breathe. So Grace felt it too, then, this naked and painful awareness? The intimacy of it was terrifying, and intoxicating. They were walking very close together. Their arms almost brushed, and then Jake’s fingers hanging loosely at his side touched the tips of Grace’s. A current shot up his arm. Their hands groped, in the folds of Grace’s blue skirt, and then clasped together. They walked on, linked together, staring straight ahead of them at Nathaniel’s back as he bent and straightened to the pole.
Clio sat facing them, her expression unreadable at this distance. It was like holding Clio’s hand, Jake thought. This hand was the same shape as Clio’s, there was the same warmth in the palm of it. But there was the sudden, startling difference. Bewildered, Jake tried to work out what he did feel.
He wanted to take Grace and hold her against the ribbed trunk of one of the trees; he wanted to rub his face against her and push his hands into the blue dress. He felt like an animal, like one of the museum’s Mammals in rut, in the grip of terrible instincts. He was disgusted, and ashamed, and confused by what had been set off within him.
He believed that what he was thinking about Grace was almost as bad as thinking it about Clio.
Jake’s skin burned and his vision blurred, but he went on walking stiffly, staring ahead of him, all the heat of him concentrated in the palm of his hand.
Grace was silent too. She was thinking, If he tries to kiss me, what will I do? She wanted him to kiss her, she wanted him to admit, although she couldn’t even have defined what the admission would be. She knew that she had suddenly acquired some power, but now she had sensed it she was afraid of using it.
She thought, I’ll let him, and then I’ll break away from him and run. I’ll know he loves me, he’ll be mine then …
Jake didn’t try to kiss her. He walked on, miserably, his eyes fixed on Clio and Nathaniel and Julius on the river, but he held on to Grace’s hand as if he would never let go.
At last they saw Nathaniel draw the pole in a wide arc from the stern of the punt. The long nose swung across the river until it pointed back towards them. It was time to head home again. Jake and Grace jumped guiltily apart. They stood awkwardly until the punt drew level and Clio’s accusing eyes settled on them.
‘Are you enjoying the walk?’ Nathaniel boomed.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Grace said.
They turned together and began to follow the punt once more. Instead of all the things he wanted to say and couldn’t, and all the banalities he might have settled for instead, Jake blurted out, ‘Are you afraid of boats?’
It was the first time since the Mabel summer that Grace had been obliged directly to refuse to go out on to the water. Usually, with some ingenuity, she was able to evade the possibility well in advance. Now she thought how inadequate Jake’s words were. ‘Afraid of boats’ took no account of the nights when she bit the insides of her mouth to stop herself falling asleep, so the dreams couldn’t come, nor of the waking cold terror of the sound of the waves, of the simple smell of salt water.
She said, ‘I think you might be too, if you had almost drowned.’
‘Why didn’t any of us know? Haven’t you told anyone?’
Grace considered. ‘I think Julius guessed.’
Jake didn’t want to hear about Julius now. Grace went on, ‘I haven’t told anyone. Only you.’
Jake gave her such a look of happiness and gratitude for singling him out that Grace forgot her humiliation over the punt.
‘You mustn’t worry about it, Grace, I’ll look after you, there’s no need to be afraid of anything.’
She smiled, looking up at him, tasting some of the satisfaction of power. ‘Thank you, Jake,’ she whispered. He was her admired cousin, their long-time ringleader, and she wanted his allegiance to her alone, that was the admission. And it came to her that although Jake was sixteen and clever and she was three whole years younger and had been taught nothing, she still knew more than he did.
Behind the folds of her skirt she reached her hand to touch his again, and he took hold of it as though it were the Grail itself.
The twins and Nathaniel were waiting at the jetty. Julius looked from one of them to the other, with resignation. Clio stared straight ahead, and even in his confusion, Jake saw that she was jealous. He took care to walk beside her on the way home. Only Nathaniel seemed oblivious to what had been happening. He had taken the newspaper out of his bag again and he beat the rolled-up tube of it against his leg as he strode along.
When they came home, Eleanor was waiting for Nathaniel. ‘Oswald Harris is here,’ she said. ‘In your study.’
Dr Harris was one of Nathaniel’s colleagues, a specialist in Romance languages and an old family friend. He was a particular favourite of the Hirsh children, and Clio’s face brightened at the mention of his name.
‘Oh good. Will he play something with us?’
‘Not now, Clio,’ Nathaniel said abruptly. ‘Off you go, all of you.’ He went into the study, and they saw Dr Harris jump up to greet him without his usual smile. Eleanor and Blanche were left in the hallway, their clothes dappled with coloured light from the stained-glass panels in the front door.
Afterwards the cousins recalled that evening at the end of July as the first time they heard adult talk of Serbia and Austria, and the first time they overheard the murmured word crisis.
They paid little attention to it, then.
That year Hugo and Jake were considered old enough to join their parents for dinner, but the twins and Grace still had to sit down with the Babies for nursery supper. Jake was hanging up his jacket in the boot room and Nanny Cooper was already calling the rest of the children to the table when Grace appeared in the doorway. The boot room was a place of discarded galoshes and fraying straw hats and croquet mallets, and she looked around it with a brilliant smile.
‘You’re here,’ she whispered. Her eyes were shining. She closed the door silently, and came straight to him. She put her hands on his forearms, and then she reached up and kissed him on the mouth.
It was a long kiss, soft-lipped and tasting of strawberries.
Jake almost fainted. When she drew back he croaked, ‘Grace, come here again, please …’ but she was already at the doorway, easing open the door and checking the corridor beyond.
Her lips looked very red, and her smile dazzled him. ‘If I don’t go, Nanny will be down here to find me. But this is a good place, isn’t it? We can meet here again. There’s all the summer, Jake.’
Then she disappeared.
Dinner was interminable. All Jake wanted was to esc
ape to his bed, to think in privacy and silence, but the adults and Hugo seemed disposed to sit with grave faces and talk all night.
‘It must come,’ Dr Harris judged. ‘I cannot see how it can be avoided now that Germany and France have mobilized.’
‘There must not be a war. Think of our poor boys,’ Blanche whispered.
‘If it does come, and I agree with Dr Harris that it must,’ Hugo intoned, ‘then I shall enlist at once. It will be over by Christmas, and I don’t want to miss it.’
‘Hugo, you can’t possibly. You are only sixteen years old.’
‘Almost seventeen, Mama, quite old enough. What do you say, Jake?’
Jake was startled out of his own thoughts, and unreasonably irritated that international events should disturb him now, when there were other things to consider. When there was Grace, with her strawberry mouth …
‘Jake, are you all right?’ Nathaniel asked.
He said stiffly, ‘Perfectly. I don’t believe there should be a war. I don’t believe that men should go out and kill each other over an Archduke or Serbian sovereignty or anything else. There should be some other way, some civilized way. Men should be able to demonstrate that they have higher instincts than animals fighting over their territory.’ He was reminded of the Mammals, and the Pitt-Rivers, and Grace’s breath clouding the glass of the display case. He was made even angrier by the realization that his face and neck were crimson, and that Hugo was eyeing him with superior amusement.
Nathaniel said gently, ‘I think you are right, Jake. But I do not believe that very many people share our views.’
At last the evening was over. Jake escaped to his bed, but there was no refuge in sleep. He lay in the darkness, rigid and sweating, envying Julius’s oblivious even breaths from the opposite bed. He could only think of Grace lying in her own bed, in her white nightgown with her hair streaming out over the pillow, just a few yards away.
She is your cousin, he told himself hopelessly. Almost your sister. But she had come to seek him out in the boot room, and there had been that precious, inflammatory kiss …
Jake groaned in his misery and rolled over on to his stomach. He did not touch himself, although he knew that there were men who did, plenty of them at school. But they had been issued with severe warnings, some more explicit than others, and Jake had been disposed to believe them.
The pressure of the mattress made it worse. He rolled over again and pushed off the blankets so that he only felt the touch of the night air. It was already light when Jake finally fell asleep.
On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia and the first shots of the European conflict were fired.
John Leominster came from London to fetch Blanche. As always when his brother-in-law was at hand, Nathaniel became noticeably more beetle-browed and clever and Germanic. After so many years of marriage the sisters had become adept at defusing the tension between their husbands with inconsequential talk, but on this sombre evening the only real topic was the likelihood of Britain entering the war. After the long-drawn-out family dinner Jake wandered away, but Hugo and John retired with Nathaniel to his study. Nathaniel poured whisky and soda, diluting Hugo’s until it was almost colourless and Hugo blinked in protest.
‘This can’t be easy for you, Hirsh,’ John said.
‘It isn’t easy for any of us. War does not have the reputation of ease.’
‘I meant for you in particular, with your, ah, antecedents.’
John Leominster knew quite well that Levi and Dora Hirsh had settled in Manchester from Bremen in the mid 1860s. Levi was a scientist, an industrial chemist, and he had prospered with England’s manufacturing prosperity. Levi and Dora had family spread across most of Europe, but after fifty years they would not have considered themselves anything but English.
‘My antecedents? I was born here, Leominster. I am as British as you are, my dear fellow.’
It was a favourite tease of Nathaniel’s. Leominster could trace his descent from Henry VII and his pale face darkened with annoyance now. ‘Not quite, but let us not argue about it.’
‘By all means not. More whisky, old chap?’
Hugo held up his glass too. ‘What do you think will happen, uncle?’
Nathaniel sighed, relinquishing the pleasure of baiting Leominster. ‘I think Britain will be at war with Germany in a matter of days. I feel great sadness for Germany and the German people, and for all of Europe. I feel the most sorrow for Jake, and you, even Julius. It will not be a short war, Hugo. You need not be afraid that you will miss it.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I shall join just as soon as I can, in any case.’
John put down his glass. ‘You may enlist when you are eighteen, Hugo, not before. I shall be proud to send you off then.’
Hugo asked eagerly, ‘And Jake? Jake is only seven months younger than I am.’
‘Jake must speak for himself, Hugo. But I understand that he feels as I do, that it should not be necessary for civilized peoples to kill and maim one another’s young men, and to leave a whole generation lying bleeding on some battlefield. I do not believe that Jake will want to go and slaughter his German cousins, and I am ashamed of the politicians and the leaders who will oblige him to make such a decision. I pray that he will have the courage to do what he believes is right, and I am sure he will find a way to be of service to our country.’
Nathaniel stood up, slowly, as if he was tired, and replaced the whisky decanter on the tray on his desk. The top of the desk was a drift of papers covered with his tiny handwriting, and he seemed to gaze longingly at it.
The Lords Leominster and Culmington exchanged glances. ‘And to show the damned Kaiser that Britain means business,’ Leominster muttered.
Nathaniel was still looking at his papers. There was the ordered world of scholarship, beckoning him. He put his hand up to rub his beard around his mouth where grey fronds were beginning to show amongst the wiry black. ‘If you wish,’ Nathaniel said absently.
‘Where is Jake?’ Hugo demanded.
‘I don’t know. I think Jake has problems of his own, just at present.’
Jake was standing at the upstairs landing window, looking down from one of the unpredictable angles of the house to the Woodstock Road below. A gas lamp on top of a tall iron post beyond the gate threw light on the evergreen shrubs beside the gate and tipped the points of the iron railings that bounded the front garden. A cyclist swooped silently past, and for an instant the street lamp laid a monster’s wavering shadow on the road before him.
Jake was not thinking about the war, or reflecting on duty and service to his country. He was wondering what his cousin Hugo did in circumstances like his own. Hugo was fond of hinting that he was a man of the world, but Jake couldn’t work out what that meant. He didn’t know either whether it was more Culmington nobly to resist temptation and think pure thoughts, or not to think at all and so avoid anxiety, as well as shame and guilt. Jake was not sure that there was any way of asking Hugo.
It was soothing to be alone in the dark, at least. He had been with Grace for most of the day, but he had never been alone with her for a second. Clio was always there, however mutely Jake willed her to take herself off. And Julius too; Julius had stayed close to them, seeing everything and saying nothing. For the first time, there was a break in the magic circle.
Jake sighed. There had been no chance to exchange a private word with Grace, let alone another kiss, a caress. They had contented themselves with looks. And he had seen that Grace looked happy, with rosier cheeks and brighter eyes than when she had arrived.
Perhaps that was enough, Jake thought. With the tender new concern he felt for her he wanted Grace to be happy as much as he wanted his own happiness. But his own happiness, or satisfaction at least, seemed to depend on the unthinkable. He remembered the boot room again, and the smell of galoshes and waterproofs and the taste of Grace. It was better that she should be happy, he told himself, and that he should suffer. It was the only solution, Cul
mington or otherwise.
Eleanor came up the stairs on her way to bed and saw Jake silhouetted at the window. He did not hear her approach and he jumped violently when she spoke.
‘Jakie, what is it? Is it the war?’
‘Yes,’ Jake lied. ‘The war.’ Even in his mother’s face he saw the shape of Grace’s features. Eleanor and Blanche and Clio. Sisters, family. And yet.
‘I was proud of what you said,’ Eleanor told him.
Jake found that he could barely remember what it was he had said. Some pompous diatribe about man’s higher instincts. Upon which, he thought, he was hardly in a position to pronounce.
‘But you are only sixteen. You are only a boy, Jake. Going to fight is for men, and so is taking the decision not to fight.’
Jake mumbled, ‘I know. I’m quite all right. I’m not worried about it.’
Eleanor put her hand up to his face. Jake stood a head taller than her; she wondered exactly when it was that this unfathomable man had emerged from the soft pupa of her child. He suffered her caress stiffly.
‘Go to bed now,’ Eleanor sighed.
Jake went obediently, and lay thinking about Grace.
By August 4, Britain was at war with Germany.
News came of crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, cheering and singing the national anthem. Hugo pored over the newspapers that carried pictures of young men flocking to recruiting offices. He ached with impatience to join them, and sighed over his misfortune in being just too young. The prospect of having to return to school for the next half while other men marched to glory filled him with despair.
It was odd to find that outwardly, visibly, nothing changed. The cousins discovered that Oxford looked exactly as it always did in the middle of the Long Vacation. The High was deserted except for plodding dons and dons’ wives shopping, and only the windows of the mens’ outfitters replaced their displays of academic robes and College ties with military tunics and officers’ caps. North Oxford drowsed beneath its canopies of trees, and there was the summer round of tennis parties and picnics and croquet games, no different from any other year.
