by Rosie Thomas
‘Is that really what you want to be?’ he asked her, teasingly, because that was the language they used with one another.
Grace said, ‘Yes.’
‘Then consider it a fact,’ Julius told her.
‘Thank you.’ She lifted her head and kissed him on the cheek. Being physically close to Julius always made Grace feel happy. There was a wholesomeness about him that she liked very much. His olive-coloured skin smelt good, and he gave and received kisses and hugs quite naturally, as if they were a matter of course.
Jake did not, she remembered. Jake jumped and started as if something hurt him, and then he clutched with overheated hands and frightened her. When she was not frightened she recognized an avid, beseeching kind of eagerness in him. It embarrassed her, and made her want to laugh, and that was not what he wanted from her at all.
Jake and Grace had not seen very much of one another since the summer at the beginning of the war, and when they had met they had ignored the few opportunities of being alone together, as if by mutual agreement.
And yet, since he had been at the hospital in France, Jake had written to her three or four times. They were extraordinary letters that didn’t seem to speak with Jake’s familiar voice. Grace kept them tied with a piece of braid in a pocket of her writing case. She did not take them out to reread when a new letter came, but quickly undid the braid and then fastened it up again.
Grace kissed Clio too, and then sat back with satisfaction between the two of them. It was comfortable with Julius’s arm around her, and with Clio on the other side, companionable instead of challenging.
I was lonely, Grace thought, and now I’m not lonely. She felt sleepily grateful to Clio and Julius.
Clio picked up her book again. ‘May I finish my French, please?’
It was the middle of October and the lawns and flowerbeds were overlaid with a brown mosaic of fallen leaves, but the bench was sheltered by a high wall of red brick and the afternoon sun was warm. For once, Grace felt glad that there was nothing else to do but sit here, resting her head against Julius’s shoulder.
At the beginning of her visit, wanting to prove her good intentions, Grace had repeated her suggestion that she might perhaps accompany Clio to her day school in Oxford. But most of the girls were the studious daughters of dons, and Grace had seen at once from the reactions of Nathaniel and Clio herself that she would be hopelessly out of her depth in a class with her own age group. She had no desire to be relegated to studying with the twelve-year-olds, and so she added quickly, ‘But my father might not want that, and perhaps I could do something here for Aunt Eleanor that would be more useful than mathematics?’
‘Nothing is more useful than mathematics, except possibly Latin,’ Nathaniel had said severely. But the Hirshes had agreed that Grace would be a valuable assistant for Eleanor in looking after the convalescents. Lately it had become her job to lay trays and to hurry upstairs with them, to cut up food and to carry hot water in jugs, and to do whatever she could to save her aunt’s legs and the energies of the overworked housemaids.
The men liked Grace, although she did not find it easy to be relaxed and happy with them and to forget what they had suffered, as Clio seemed able to do.
The middle of the afternoon, once the luncheon trays had been cleared away, was the quiet part of the day. The convalescents were sleeping, or reading, and even Tabby and Alice were resting.
It was good, Grace reflected, to be busy enough to find a break in the afternoon sunshine so welcome.
Julius stirred beside her. ‘Are you asleep?’ he whispered.
‘No. Just thinking.’
Of all Grace’s moods and humours, and he could have listed a score without any effort, Julius liked her contemplative manner best. He felt closest to her then, as if they could exchange ideas without words, across some invisible membrane. ‘Serious thoughts?’
She smiled at once, skimming away from him. ‘Not very. Not at all.’
Clio jammed her fingers into her ears and hunched closer over her textbook. ‘I’m trying to work. Please.’
Julius lifted his arm from Grace’s shoulders, yawned, and stretched his long legs. ‘And I have to go and practise.’
Grace said, ‘May I come and listen?’ She liked to be the audience, sitting silently through the music and applauding when he reached the end of a piece. Sometimes Julius played to his audience of one, tucking his violin under his arm and making a deep bow, and sometimes he lost himself in the music and forgot her altogether.
‘You certainly may,’ Clio answered for him, and Julius and Grace laughed and walked back through the garden to the house.
Julius’s room was bare, like a monk’s cell. The papers and sheets of music on his table were laid in neat piles and squared off at right angles to each other. The covers on the iron-framed bed were drawn up with the same geometric precision. The only ornament was an engraving of the head of Mozart hanging on the wall next to the window.
Grace hesitated between the smooth bed and the upright chair in a corner, and opted for the chair. She sat down, straight-backed, and folded her hands in her lap.
Julius lifted his violin and tucked it beneath his chin. Grace saw how it became part of him. With the tip of his bow he indicated the sheet music on the music stand. ‘The Rondo Capriccioso, Camille Saint-Saëns,’ he announced formally. And then he added, ‘It’s rather difficult, in parts.’
It was one of the pieces his teacher had recommended he work up for his Royal College audition. The flying staccato run in E major still made him feel sweaty when he thought of it. ‘It calls for practice, Julius,’ his teacher had advised him. He took a breath now and lifted his bow.
Grace listened, intently at first, but then her attention began to wander. There was a fast section, where the notes seemed to climb and tumble over each other, and each time he played it Grace was sure that this time Julius would be satisfied with it and move on. But each time he broke off and jerked his bow away from the strings, closed his eyes to refocus his attention, and then began again, over and over.
Grace could not even hear what it was that displeased him.
She would have been incapable of such perfectionism herself. All her own instincts would have led her to scramble through the awkward passage somehow, anyhow, and then to hurry on, aiming for the end in one triumphant rush.
Julius stopped yet again, and patiently began one more time. He had forgotten she was there. She watched his face with its shuttered look of intense concentration.
She knew that Clio’s schoolfriends considered Julius to be handsome, and she had agreed with their judgement without giving it very much thought. Now, as she studied him with detachment through the skein of music, she noticed that he had heavy rounded eyelids that looked as if they might have been sculpted and a deep upper lip with a strongly defined margin, and that his perfectly harmonious features were more feminine than conventionally handsome. He looked like Clio, of course. And so there was much more than an echo of her own face in Julius’s. She had known it, but now she catalogued the similarities as if she had never been aware of them before, the colour of eyes and skin, the shape of mouth and ears and the height of cheekbones. Grace smiled faintly.
The music flowed on. This time, she realized, there was no stopping. The log jam of tumbling notes broke up and was carried away in the stream of the melody. Grace found herself leaning forward on her hard chair and willing him on, holding her breath for him as if it would help him to reach the release at the end of the piece.
The music swelled, filling her head and the bare room until she sat on the edge of her seat, her lips apart and her eyes fixed on Julius’s blind absorbed face. The echo of the last chord vibrated in the stillness before she realized it was finished, and then Julius raised his head and she saw his shining eyes. He was panting for breath.
‘Bravo,’ Grace shouted. She jumped off the chair and clapped her hands until the bones jarred. ‘Julius, bravo. That was wonderful.’
&n
bsp; He nested his violin carefully in its case, then straightened up again. ‘It was better, anyway,’ he gasped.
‘No,’ Grace said seriously. ‘It was wonderful.’ She meant it, and he heard it in her voice, and he crooked his arm around her shoulders again.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Empty of the music, the room seemed very silent. They stood side by side, next to the window, looking down into the garden. Clio’s bent head was visible beneath the walnut tree at the far end, and beyond her were the trees of other gardens with bare branches beginning to poke through their faded summer covering, and the gables and slate roofs and brick chimneys of North Oxford. Grace liked the domesticity of this view, after the emptiness of Stretton Park and the grimy, pompous expanse of Belgrave Square. It amused her to imagine the blameless academic lives that were lived behind all the blandly shining windows.
Julius had no attention to spare for the view. He was too conscious of Grace’s warm shoulder and arm beneath his own. He had grown rapidly in the last year – he was taller even than Jake now – and he stood a head higher than Clio and Grace. Grace seemed very slight and fragile next to his own lumbering bulk. He turned his head very slightly, breathlessly, so that he could look down on the top of her dark head. Clio still wore her hair in a long plait that hung down her back, but Grace had put her hair up in a shiny, smooth roll that showed her ears. He could see the pink rim of her ear now, and the whiteness of her neck in the shadow of her blouse collar.
He felt a spasm of tenderness for her, and at the same time a startling, fierce determination that he would never allow anything to hurt her.
He moved round so that he stood in front of her, blocking out the vista of trees and rooftops. Grace looked up at him, her mouth opening a little, surprised but unafraid.
Julius wanted to take her face between his hands and hold it, so that he could study all the contours of it, but he felt too clumsy to trust himself. Instead he bent forward, slowly and stiffly, and kissed the corner of her mouth.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, afterwards.
‘I know it is,’ Grace answered. She was at ease with Julius. She didn’t feel any of the fear or fascination that Jake had set off inside her two summers ago. Julius was safe. His smooth skin smelt faintly of honey, she identified it now. He carried an aura of cleanliness with him. She knew that he loved her, and she loved him back, a love with clearly defined parameters.
Julius blushed. He was suffused with happiness that made him feel weak and light-headed, but he also felt quite calm and secure. There was no rush, no cause for anxiety. Grace was here, and there was plenty of time. If he had made himself analyse it he would not have been able to define what exactly there was time for, now or in the mysterious future, but the rush of happiness defeated logic. He wanted to lift Grace up in his arms and swing her round, laughing and shouting, but the knowledge of his own clumsiness restrained him again. Instead he reached out and touched her shoulder, near where the collar of her blouse folded against her throat. Immediately all the sensation in his body concentrated itself in his fingertips. The fabric semed ethereally soft, as if it might melt under his touch. He shook his head, slowly, in amazement.
Grace reached up and took his hand. She turned him gently so that they faced the window again, and then settled herself against him, in the crook of his arm. To Julius, the gesture seemed wonderfully natural and confiding. He held her and they went on looking out at the view together.
He didn’t know how long it was they stood there, but it seemed a long time.
At last, they heard Tabby running down the linoleum corridor outside the door. She was calling for Eleanor, and there was a clatter as she jumped three steps in the angle of the passage and skidded along the slippery stretch to the nursery. Another door slammed somewhere else in the house, and Grace and Julius remembered that they were not the only people in the world.
Grace stepped to one side and put her hands up to her hair, smoothing it where it was already smooth. Julius loved the womanly economy of the gesture. He was thinking, I will remember this, the look of her, the way she is outlined in the light against the window.
‘I must go and help Aunt Eleanor,’ she said.
Julius watched her go, and watched the door for a long moment after it had closed behind her. Then he picked up his violin again. He could play the Rondo now, he wasn’t afraid of it any longer.
Nathaniel came home, bringing the evening papers with him. Eleanor hurried to meet him as she always did, as soon as she heard his key in the lock. Their eyes met, telling one another, No bad news. Not yet. Only then did Nathaniel kiss her. Tabby and Alice came running and he lifted them up in turn and swung them in the air, growling like a bear to make them laugh and then scream to be put down again. Julius came more slowly down the stairs and Nathaniel clasped him briefly. They were the same height, now.
Evenings in the Woodstock Road belonged to the family. It was one of the things Grace particularly liked about staying with the Hirshes, that there had never been the starching and combing before the stiff half-hour visit to the drawing room that was always the routine at home.
Before dinner Eleanor and Nathaniel always sat in the big, comfortable room at the back of the house that looked down over a narrow wrought-iron balcony into the garden. Nathaniel sometimes played Pelmanism with the children, all of them ranged in a circle around the mahogany table. A lamp with a shade of multi-coloured glass threw flecks of different-coloured light on the ring of faces. On other evenings Eleanor played the piano or Julius his violin, and the children took it in turns to sing. Nathaniel particularly enjoyed the singing, and would join in in his resonant bass. His voice was so unsuited to the sentimental Victorian ballads that Eleanor favoured that the children would have to struggle to avoid collapsing into furtive giggles.
At other times there were the general knowledge games that Grace dreaded because she seemed to know even less than Tabby, and she would hurriedly suggest charades or recitations as a diversion. Jake’s special piece had always been a theatrical rendering of ‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’; when she closed her eyes on this evening’s tableau of Eleanor sewing and Julius and Nathaniel playing cards with the little girls, Grace could hear him intoning ‘I sprang to the stirrup’. He always snatched up the invisible bridle and bared his teeth like a brigand.
There was no Jake tonight, of course. They felt his absence. With her new empathy Grace knew that Clio, hunched over a book in the corner of the room, was not reading but thinking about him.
Jake’s place was taken by two of Eleanor’s convalescents. They sat near to her, talking quietly. But for this difference the well-worn room looked just as it always did, with its sagging seats and piles of books and newspapers, and the murky picture of steamers on the Rhine that always hung on the wall facing the French windows.
But Grace was possessed by the realization that everything was changing. The war had crept in here, into the Woodstock Road as well as Stretton; she had not even understood how significantly. She tasted a mixture of resentment and apprehension, dry in her mouth.
When Clio’s eyes wandered yet again from her book they met Grace’s. Even the old ground between them was changing its contours, but they were both glad of that. They needed their new friendship now.
Before dinner, Nanny came to take Alice and Tabby back up to the nursery. Nathaniel poured sherry into little cut-glass thimbles for the men, and there was general talk until it was time to go in to dinner.
Tonight, one of the housemaids had placed the evening post on a silver tray that stood on the hall table. When the family crossed the hall on the way to the dining room they saw that there were two thin blue foreign envelopes lying side by side.
Eleanor moved with surprising speed. She scooped up the two letters from Jake and then, seeing the inscriptions, she held one of them out with a little involuntary sigh of disappointment.
‘One is for you, Grace.’
It was the
first letter she had received in the Woodstock Road. The others had been addressed to Stretton, or Belgrave Square. She took it, feeling the harsh crackle of the envelope between her fingers. She put it straight into the pocket of her skirt, without looking at it. She felt that the Hirshes were watching her, as if she had taken something that was rightfully theirs.
‘Shall we go in?’ Nathaniel murmured at last.
Eleanor opened her letter and had read it before the maid placed the soup tureen on the table in front of her. She looked up from the single flimsy sheet of paper.
‘He’s well,’ she said. ‘There is – there was when he was writing, rather – a kind of lull. He calls it the calm before the next storm.’
There were tears plainly visible in Eleanor’s eyes, but no one was careless enough to see them. She refolded the letter and handed it down the table to Nathaniel, and then began briskly ladling soup.
Captain Smith, one of the convalescents, said, ‘I admire what your son is doing, Professor. I was in one of those hospitals before they sent me back home. They do a fine job.’
He wanted them to know he understood Jake’s beliefs, wanted them to be aware that he didn’t consider him a shirker. It was not the Captain’s fault that he sounded like Hugo. Grace’s eyes met Clio’s again.
Nathaniel lifted his head. ‘Of course,’ he said.
The letter passed to Julius, and then to Clio. They were greedy for the news, there was no question of politely waiting until dinner was over.
Grace felt the generosity of it when Clio passed the blue paper to her in her turn. She was aware of the second letter burning in her pocket.
