by Rosie Thomas
Jake bore the sociable routine half impatiently and half gladly because it occupied the four of them and allowed him to be harmlessly near to Grace. Grace was very lively. Her vivacity made Clio look like her smaller shadow.
There were no more meetings in the boot room, because Grace did not look for the opportunities. Jake realized that he was shadowing her like a patient dog, hoping for a scrap of intimacy. She rewarded him with private smiles, and with the touch of her hand sometimes, when no one else was looking. He was tormented by the inadequacy of their contacts, and at the same time relieved that he did not have to control himself as he would if they were to find themselves alone.
The long days of August passed quickly, even for Hugo in the agony of his inactivity.
At the end of the month there was a picnic beside the river at Iffley, when the Hirshes and their cousins were joined by Dr Harris and his wife and small children. Nathaniel and Oswald Harris spread rugs and a white linen cloth in the shade of the trees, and Eleanor and Mary Harris unpacked wicker baskets and spooned raspberries into glass dishes. The small children ran and fell over in the grass, and Hugo and Jake and Julius swam in the river. Their shouts and splashings were swallowed prematurely by the still, heavy air. Nathaniel predicted that the day would end with a thunderstorm.
Clio and Grace, in white dresses and straw sunhats, walked arm in arm along the footpath. Grace unravelled coarse strands of goose-grass from the hedge and twisted them into sticky garlands for their straw hats.
‘You look like a girl in a painting,’ she told Clio. ‘Raspberry juice on your chin and leaves in your hair. It ought to be red wine, and vine leaves, and you could pose for Bacchus. He is the god of wine, isn’t he?’
‘Revelry, as well. He’s Dionysus in Greek. Painters give him crowns of grapes and vine leaves, yes.’ When she had delivered her speech Clio regretted her pedantry, but Grace seemed as always to be glad of the information.
‘Mmm, you’ll do for him, then. What shall I be?’
‘Helen of Troy,’ Clio said. She would have gone on to make some wry observation on the distinction between her brother and Paris, but Grace good-humouredly interrupted her. Grace didn’t seem to know anything about Helen of Troy.
‘Listen, Dr Harris is calling. They must want us for something.’ She held out her arm again and Clio took it. There was no sense in being resentful of Grace. Grace herself did not harbour resentment. But then, Clio reflected, she had no reason to.
Oswald Harris was directing preparations for a wide game. He waved his arms in excitable sweeps, ordering children in different directions. Hugo forgot his dignity and ran with Julius and Clio and the Harris children.
‘You are the quarry,’ Dr Harris called after them. ‘Run, now.’
He turned back to the depleted circle gathered around the remains of the picnic. ‘Jake and Grace, you are the hunters. Give them five minutes exactly.’
They waited, not looking at each other, paying exaggerated attention to counting the seconds.
Eleanor and Mary Harris leant against the trunk of an elm tree, talking in low voices. A little distance away Nathaniel lay on the rug, propped on one elbow. Tabby had fallen asleep beside him, and he had placed his old panama hat to shade her head. He was watching Alice who made little lunging rushes to and fro through the tufts of tall grass. He saw her tilt her head backwards to follow the flight of a white butterfly, and as it rose she leant too far backwards and overbalanced. She lay on her back, staring at the sky from under the brim of her cotton sunbonnet. The butterfly still hovered above her, and in her fascination she forgot to cry.
Nathaniel saw the wide meadow dotted with sheaves of corn, and the willows on the opposite bank of the river, and Jake vaulting the gate into the next field before opening it to let Grace through. He heard the women murmuring, and the creak and splash of a skiff on the river, and one of the Harris children, a long way off, calling a taunt to the hunters.
Along the borders of Eastern Prussia, the Russian soldiers of General Samsonov’s Second Army were being cut down by German shellfire. With the sun hot on his bare head and the afternoon’s warmth beginning to build into oppressive stillness, Nathaniel imagined the thunder of the guns, and the stench of burning, and sudden death.
The same world contained these two realities: the picnic and the battlefield, and Nathaniel knew that the threads that bound them together were tightening, drawing them closer every day.
At home in London the exhibition hall at Olympia had been converted into a camp for aliens. Hundreds of Germans living in England had been rounded up and imprisoned there, and many more had suffered the ransacking of their homes on suspicion of being enemy spies. Only two days earlier, a policeman had come to visit Nathaniel. He had left his bicycle leaning against the stone steps leading up to the front door in the Woodstock Road, and when the outraged housemaid had shown him into Nathaniel’s study he had stood awkwardly on the threshold, turning his helmet over and over in his hands.
‘I’m sorry, Professor Hirsh,’ he kept saying.
‘What do you want to do?’ Nathaniel asked him. ‘Search this room for coded messages to General von Hindenburg? Arrest me for treason?’ The conversations he had had with John Leominster seemed prophetic now, not comical at all.
‘Of course not, sir,’ the man said miserably. ‘It’s a matter of formality. It’s this DORA, isn’t it?’
Nathaniel wondered what else the powers of the Defence of the Realm Act might bring, and what his children would have to suffer for bearing a name that he was proud of.
In the sunny meadow he scrambled to his feet and ran to where Alice lay on the grass. He scooped her up and touched his lips to the warm baby flesh at the back of her neck.
‘I love you,’ he murmured to her. ‘Ich liebe dich.’
Jake and Grace stood face to face in an angle of the hedge, hidden from the world by a green buttress of hawthorn branches.
‘I love you,’ Jake said hotly. The taunting calls of their hidden quarry filled the heavy air like the cries of birds. Jake didn’t care about anything except Grace, and the dampness of her skin under the weight of her hair, and the pulse of her throat just above the white collar of her dress. He fixed his eyes on the fluttering beat of it.
‘Jake …’
She touched his face, and then his black hair, still slick and wet with river water. The gesture reminded him of his mother’s and he snatched her wrist and held it.
‘Don’t say anything,’ he begged her. ‘Just be here. Just like this …’
He put his hands around her waist. It was narrow, the fragility of her body surprised and stirred him. He could feel the curve of her ribs, and the soft small swellings above. His hands rested there, he didn’t dare to move them, and he was afraid that his knees would give way beneath him.
Jake bent his head, darkening her face with his own shadow. He touched her mouth with his own and his tongue found her teeth like a barrier, and then she opened her mouth and it was hotter and wetter than his own. He kissed her, drinking her in as if he had been dying of thirst.
Her head fell back, baring her throat, and her straw hat with its wilting Dionysian garland dropped off and lay at their feet.
Grace almost toppled under his leaning weight but he caught her, and they half fell and half lay down in the grass under their hawthorn hedge. Jake pressed himself on top of her, and his hands found the hem of her white dress, and the folds of her petticoat, all the mysterious layers of feminine apparel, and then the little mound between her legs, tight and innocent like the smooth rump of a small animal.
‘Jake, Jake,’ Grace was almost screaming. For an instant she was stronger than he was. She pushed him aside and scrambled up, snatching her crushed hat from beneath him. There was grass caught in her hair and in the tucks of her dress. She crammed her hat on her tumbled hair and ran away, towards the voices, her own cry rising to theirs, ‘Coming to find you. Coming to find you.’
Jake rolled on to his side
and lay staring through the stalks of grass, reduced to the same level as the insects that crossed his limited field of vision. The grass was damp against his cheek, but he was sticky with heat and he found that he was panting for breath. He lay still until his breathing steadied again, watching the miniature world inches from his face.
The voices were a long way off now; he knew that he was alone. Grace had run away from him, and a kind of carelessness replaced his anxiety. He found that he didn’t mind that she was gone, that he was even relieved. Dreamily, still watching the waving blades of grass, Jake undid his clothes. It felt indecent to be exposed in the open air, in daylight, but the air was deliciously cool. He stretched out, flattening himself against the earth, his thoughts stilled.
He closed his fingers around himself, tentatively at first, and then with a firmer grasp.
After a month, a long month of suppressing himself, it did not take much. He was not thinking of Grace, or of anything at all except obeying his instincts. The pleasure of the orgasm raced all through his body, wave after wave, but the satisfaction and relief that followed it was better. It was like a blessing. His limbs felt heavy and soft, like a baby’s, and he curled on his side listening to the empty air.
Jake opened his eyes again on the grass world, and then on the sky over his head. Heavy, piled clouds had rolled over the sun, but the margins of them were still rimmed with gold. He smiled, and raised himself on one elbow, then sat up and spread his arms until the joints cracked. He saw that there were pearly drops on the grass where he had been lying, bending the blades of grass. They didn’t look ugly, or unnatural, or in any way unclean. They seemed shiny and quite innocent. Jake waited for the waves of guilt to come, echoing the pleasure, but nothing did. He only felt calm, and comfortable.
He stood up then, buttoning his trousers up. Then he bent down and tore some handfuls of the long grass, and dropped them over the evidence of himself in the sheltered angle of the hawthorn hedge. He felt light and springy, full of energy. He had done nothing wrong, it occurred to him. He was right, and all the murky advice and warnings he had been given were wrong.
He lifted his head and called loudly, ‘Coming to find you.’
Nathaniel had been right about the thunderstorm. It broke in the early evening, sending Tabby and the housemaids scuttling to Nanny in the nursery and making Alice break out in wails of uncomprehending protest.
Clio and Grace sat in their bedroom while the rain drummed on the roof and bounced in fat drops off the streaming Woodstock Road. Grace was humming and brushing Clio’s hair, long rhythmic strokes that made it spark and crackle. In his room, Julius was practising the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Clio loved the music but Julius kept breaking off in the same bar, repeating a handful of phrases with his perfectionist’s concentration.
‘Your hair is prettier than mine,’ Grace said, breaking off from her humming. ‘It’s silkier. I’ll give it one hundred more brushes, and it will shine.’
Clio sighed languorously. She felt happier this evening than she had done since the beginning of the holiday. Jake and Grace had appeared separately during the game; they could have been together but she was sure they had not. Jake had looked ordinary, too, instead of always covertly peering at Grace and then glancing hastily away in case anyone noticed him doing it.
Grace herself had been friendly, perhaps a little quieter than usual. Clio thought that the atmosphere between them all was as it used to be, except that Julius watched what went on and said nothing.
The intimacy created by the storm and the hairbrushing and Grace’s humming made Clio feel bold, and she said, ‘I think it’s stupid, all the boy and girl business. Like you and Jake sighing and staring at each other. It spoils everything.’
There were two or three more brush strokes, and silence, while Grace seemed to consider. Then she laughed, putting the hairbrush down and leaning over Clio’s shoulder so that she could see their twin reflections in the mirror. ‘Do you know what? I think you’re right. It does spoil everything.’
In a month, since the Pitt-Rivers day, she had seen Jake change from the admirable leader and innovator she had hero-worshipped almost from babyhood into a duller, slower twin of himself. Jake blushed now, and hovered awkwardly, and tried to catch her in corners. She wanted to be admired and singled out and even kissed, but by the old glamorous Jake, not the new hesitant one. And then today, when he did catch her, he hadn’t acted as he was supposed to act. Grace wasn’t exactly sure how that was, except to do homage to her in some way, perhaps kneeling down, perhaps eloquently declaring that he would love her for ever, would go to the war and fight and die for her sake.
Instead he had frightened her, and she had frightened herself. She wasn’t supposed to feel like that, when he touched her there, was she? She had run away, run in real terror, back to the other children and the rules of the game.
It was cosy in Clio’s bedroom with the two white beds turned down and the night-light burning on the table between them. Clio would turn it out when they went to sleep, but for now it gave the room the look of the old night-nursery at Stretton.
Grace picked up the hairbrush again and began the long smooth strokes through her cousin’s hair. Clio looked pleased and Grace smiled over her shoulder at her reflection. ‘Look at us. We are alike, aren’t we?’
Clio did look, at Grace’s face behind her own, a pale moon in the dim room. The rain was still hammering down outside.
She said, ‘I don’t know. I suppose we are, a little.’
The same night, in bed listening to the rain, Jake repeated what he had done under the hawthorn hedge. The sensation was less surprising and so even more pleasurable, but it was the sense of calm and relief afterwards that affected him most strongly. He knew that he would sleep, and that images of Grace and Clio and even Blanche and Eleanor would not rise up to torment and reproach him. His bed felt soft and safe, like arms wrapped around him. He began to speculate drowsily about his own unpredictable body, quiescent at last, however temporarily. He realized that he knew almost nothing about what made it work, or why he had been obliged to suffer for a month, or why it was considered wrong or dangerous or wicked to do what he had just done, so simply and satisfyingly. He knew even less about Grace’s body, even though he had speculated furtively about it for so many leaden days. What did Grace feel, what did Grace know? He did feel ashamed that he had frightened her.
And yet, Jake thought, he knew Latin and classical Greek, and the planets of the solar system, and algebra and trigonometry, and the countries of the world and their rivers and mountains and principal exports. Why such ignorance about himself, his own insistent flesh and blood?
Just before he fell asleep, an idea came to him.
In the morning he found Nathaniel in the breakfast room, The Times folded beside his plate. They were the first members of the household to come down. Jake helped himself to ham and eggs from the silver dish on the sideboard and sat down beside his father. He ate hungrily, watching Nathaniel frowning over the news from Europe. Then he said, ‘May we discuss something, Pappy?’
Nathaniel put his newspaper aside. ‘Of course.’
‘I have been thinking about what I should do. It’s time I had an idea. Even Hugo knows that he wants to be a soldier.’
‘Even Hugo,’ Nathaniel agreed seriously.
‘I would like to study medicine. I should like to be a doctor.’
‘You have never talked about this before.’
‘I have been thinking. I know something about so many things, and nothing about myself. Anatomy, physiology, chemistry. It came to me that nothing would interest me more than to learn, and then to apply that knowledge. The world will need doctors. I could be a doctor, not a soldier.’
Nathaniel looked hard at him. He had been thinking that Jake had shaken off his preoccupation of the last weeks, regained his old animation. Whatever his problem had been with Grace, he must have found the answer to it. Nathaniel trusted his son enough to be certain th
at it was the right answer.
He said, ‘If you are serious, I think it is a fine idea. I will talk to the medical man at College.’
Jake beamed at him, as pleased as a small boy. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. He went back to the sideboard and mounded his plate with a second helping of ham and eggs.
Nathaniel turned back to his newspaper, but the grey print blurred. He was thinking about Julius and hoping that when his turn came for Grace’s attention, if it did come, he would deal with it as sensibly as Jake had done.
Four
Blanche followed her housekeeper through the enfilade of rooms that ran along the south front of Stretton. The long vista was dim because the shutters were closed. The few bright beams of sunshine that pierced the cracks and fell across their path seemed solid enough to trip her, much more solid than the furniture invisible and shapeless under its dust-covers. She stepped through one of the golden rods, and the finger of it ran over her face and then fell back over the floor behind her.
Blanche had flinched when the beam of sunlight touched her. She was thinking of Hugo, who had gone at last to join his regiment in France.
She knew that he would be killed, she knew it with unshakeable certainty, and when she thought of him, as now, the air itself seemed to bruise her with its weight of terror.
Blanche had to force herself to concentrate on Mrs Dixey’s broad back marching in front of her, to harness her thoughts to Stretton and these dim shuttered rooms. They were closing them up until the end of the war.
If the day ever comes, Blanche thought. And if I could close up the fear, as if it were the saloon or the yellow drawing room …
‘The china from these rooms is all packed in the chests now, my lady,’ the housekeeper said. ‘And stored in the billiard room, like you ordered.’
‘Very good,’ Blanche said automatically. The silver had been taken away to the security vaults, and the better pictures had been lifted down from the walls. There were darker rectangles on the faded silks and damasks, showing the places where generations of Strettons had stared down on their successors.
