by Rosie Thomas
Clio felt the blood humming in her ears. Pilgrim twitched the shroud off the easel. A little noise, like a mouse’s squeak, came out of Blanche’s mouth. After that there was silence.
Clio couldn’t recall afterwards who had spoken first, or what the exact words had been. She only remembered that the silence was suddenly filled with words, tremulous whispers from Blanche and sharp barks from John. Not what we expected, Blanche murmured, not suitable at all. And John snapped filthy, and disgusting daub, and travesty of the respectable art of portraiture. Grace stood between them, red-faced and round-eyed, looking as if she wished that her parents could be swallowed up by the paint-splattered floorboards. At that moment she didn’t care what the portrait looked like, only that her parents would not humiliate her in front of Pilgrim.
Clio edged closer to Nathaniel. She saw that her father was looking carefully at The Janus Face, rubbing his beard with the palm of his hand as he did when he was giving something his critical attention.
‘I won’t pay for it,’ John said at last. ‘Not a penny. You’ll be lucky if I don’t sue.’
‘We couldn’t hang it, you see,’ Blanche fluttered beside him. ‘Not at Stretton. Not alongside the Sargent.’
Pilgrim’s smile had vanished. ‘The Sargent,’ he snarled. ‘The bloody chocolate box Sargent. Well, my lord and lady, I tell you that I wouldn’t sell my picture to you. I wouldn’t sell it to you if it were the last thing between me and starvation. I wouldn’t take your mothball-stinking, blind-eyed, miserable money to save myself from the gallows.’
He was shouting now. Grace imagined that the words boomed down the stairs and swirled up through the glass skylights to echo over Charlotte Street for all the world to hear. She wanted to hide her face in her hands. ‘The Janus Face is not for sale. Not to you, my lord. Go and buy yourself another Sargent, if that is what you want.’
John Leominster pulled his tweeds more closely around him, as if Pilgrim might touch and contaminate him. Then he gripped Blanche by the elbow, jerked his head at Clio and Grace, and steered them all to the door without a backward glance. He made an ostentatious detour around the easel.
Nathaniel lingered. He was still examining the canvas. Pilgrim rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand and scowled at him.
Nathaniel said, ‘I would like to buy the picture. It is a portrait of my daughter, as well as Lord Leominster’s.’
‘I told you. It’s not for sale.’
Nathaniel inclined his head courteously. ‘That is for you to decide, of course. If you should change your mind, I would be glad to hear of it.’ He took out one of his cards and placed it on the corner of the table. Then he followed the rest of the family downstairs to the waiting car.
Pilgrim snatched the picture from the easel. He held it up, twisting the wooden stretcher, glowering as if he was about to fling it to the ground. But then he seemed to think better of it. He replaced the portrait and stood for a long moment looking at the two figures. At last, he gave a snort of laughter.
‘Filthy daub,’ he said affectionately. He found a half-empty bottle of whisky in the clutter, took it up by the neck and drank deeply.
Grace missed Clio’s company. It was five days since Nathaniel had taken her back to Oxford.
She stood up from the writing desk in her bedroom and walked across to the window. A gale in the night had stripped the leaves from the trees in the square. There was nothing to see.
If Clio were here, there would be someone to talk to. To Grace, their quarrels were no more than enjoyable sparring matches. Clio irritated her sometimes, with her accuracy and circumspection, but Grace thought of her as an ally. Especially so now that Jake and Julius were busy with their own lives. Grace remembered the red-haired, actressy-looking woman who had blown kisses to Julius at the opera, and the way Julius had blushed when Anthony asked him about her. Grace had been just a little shocked. Julius had always been her own unquestioning admirer.
She turned back across the room and sat down at her table again, resting her chin in her hands. She thought nostalgically of the days when they had been the magic circle, Clio and herself and Jake and Julius.
If only there were someone to talk to.
She had begun a letter to Clio, but she had broken off after only a few lines. She wanted to write about Pilgrim and the anger and shame she had felt when John rejected the portrait. But Clio had become her rival for Pilgrim’s attention. They had stopped talking about him and had set out to make their separate claims on Charlotte Street.
Grace picked up her pen and turned it over in her fingers before putting it down with a sigh. The house was empty. John and Hugo were in the country, Blanche was out at a luncheon party, and Phoebe was a baby in the schoolroom. Thomas was away at Eton.
There would be plenty of talk in the Eiffel, Grace thought. She could see Pilgrim sitting at his table with a bottle in front of him, papers spread all around. There would be Stulik, surging forward in welcome, and the regular traffic of friends.
It came to Grace with sudden clarity that she could be part of that traffic, simply by walking into the Eiffel herself. She was a modern woman, and needed no one’s permission.
She went straight to the nursery and told Nanny Brodribb that if her mother should come home and happen to ask where she was, she had gone shopping. To Selfridges. To buy some handkerchiefs. She walked out into Belgrave Square and hailed a taxi.
The restaurant was almost empty in the late afternoon lull, but Pilgrim was in his usual place. Grace looked through the red curtains and saw him, and she felt a moment’s shyness. But then she straightened her shoulders. She only wanted someone to talk to, she told herself, and Pilgrim was always happy to talk. Clio had gone and left her on her own, but that also meant that the field was clear. She had Bohemia all to herself.
Pilgrim looked up as she came in. A shadow of impatience was replaced by a welcoming smile. He stook up and took her hands. They had not seen each other since the unveiling of the portrait.
‘Grace, Grace. This is a pleasure. Sit down here with me. You look very pretty, but you know that, don’t you? Shall I have Giovanni bring you some tea?’
One of the waiters loitered near the brass centrepiece. Grace shook her head. ‘No tea, thank you.’ She peeled off her gloves and laid them on the cloth in front of her. The white linen was spotted with wine and gravy. Pilgrim had been having a long lunch, and she wondered with whom.
‘I came to say I was sorry,’ she improvised.
Pilgrim lit a yellow cigarette and handed it to her, and took another for himself. They contemplated each other through the smoke.
‘You don’t have to apologize for your father’s philistinism.’
A spark of tension licked between them. Grace breathed in sharply. She had never heard her father spoken of with open disrespect.
But Pilgrim was right, she thought. John Leominster had revealed his rude ignorance.
‘What will you do with the portrait now?’ Pilgrim had not asked her for her opinion of The Janus Face, she noticed, although he had been eager to hear Clio’s.
‘I shall keep it. I’m pleased with it. I may loan it, if a suitable place for it to hang presents itself.’ Pilgrim watched her expectantly, but Grace did not know how she was supposed to respond.
‘I hope it does,’ she said calmly. She had seen that his eyes were bloodshot and the skin was grey below them. Bluish stubble emphasized the hollows under his cheekbones. Pilgrim had evidently been enjoying himself since she had last seen him, and she wondered again who his companion could have been. Perhaps the silver-haired girl from the opera, she thought. Possessiveness together with an absurd wish to protect and care for him overtook her. Pilgrim’s weariness made him seem vulnerable, and less awe-inspiring than he had done before.
Remembering the afternoon in the studio a week ago Grace felt an angry distaste for Belgrave Square, and a consequent sense of her own isolation. She was not sure now where she belonged, or where her allegiance lay
. But out of the confusion of her feelings came one certainty, that she was powerfully drawn to Pilgrim, and that the attraction was adult, no longer anything to do with the childish subterfuges she had practised with Jake and Julius, and with Peter Dennis. She raised her eyes, and looked into his.
Grace wondered if this moment was the first of real adulthood. The sense of its importance created a pressure in her chest.
‘And so, what now?’ Pilgrim asked softly.
Colour rose in Grace’s cheeks. ‘I was lonely,’ she said. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
The honesty of the admission touched him. It had not occurred to Pilgrim that Grace Stretton might feel anything of the kind. He had supposed that her days would be too full of shopping and lunching. He put out his hand and rested it over hers. Her bones felt small and brittle, like a bird’s. She was, he was thinking, so … ordered. Her shining hair was coiled under her little hat and secured with a pearl hatpin. Her single strand pearl necklace showed at her throat under the collar of her shell-pink blouse. Her dove-grey suit fitted her, must have been made for her, and it was brushed and pressed, and the empty fingers of her pale grey gloves were neither stained nor darned. She smelt sweet, and her lips were slightly parted, and her breath stirred the hair of her fur wrap.
Jeannie was not ordered. She carried her own grubbiness and disarray with her. And Isolde …
Isolde could not be categorized, but Pilgrim knew that he would never see her in a pearl necklace. The recollection of her, and the juxtaposition of that image with Grace, made him feel suddenly, distinctly aroused. He had thought that he was much too tired, but now he knew that he was not.
‘We can’t talk here,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
He held on to Grace’s willing hand and led her out of the restaurant. Giovanni watched them with an impassive face, but when the door had closed behind them he clicked his tongue. He turned the card that hung against the glass so that it read in its French script ‘FERME.’ They could all wait now, he told himself, until the proper time to open for dinner.
Pilgrim locked the door of his studio behind them.
Grace looked around her, suppressing a shiver, although she was not cold. It was all familiar, but she was seeing it differently. She had no reason to be here alone with Pilgrim, no social alibi. The Janus Face might be one of any of the dozens of canvases turned with their faces to the wall, and it was finished.
She was on new territory. Modern women, she reminded herself. She thought fleetingly of Clio, and as Pilgrim came towards her she felt a little, indecent flicker of triumph.
He undid the clasp of her pearls and let the strand run through his fingers into the palm of his hand, a nacreous snake. With an answering gesture she drew the pin out of her hat and lifted off the shell of veiled felt. Her hair fell round her shoulders.
Grace was not embarrassed to find herself undressed. She had sat for hours in her silk underclothes on the shawled divan, with Pilgrim’s eyes on her. He led her back to her old place now, and slipped the silk straps down. His hand felt large and rough on her skin, on her breast.
Grace was exhilarated and afraid, as well as triumphant, but as Pilgrim touched her she felt another sensation. It was a surprising and strident physical urgency all of her own.
She put up her arms, wrapped them around Pilgrim’s neck. She drew him down to her, closer, until his unkempt head obliterated the light. Then there was nothing to see but his eyes, and the dark bar of his eyebrows, and the puckers and creases of his skin, suddenly revealed to her in all their intricacy.
He pushed her backwards until she lay flat and he hung over her, magnified in the field of her vision. He kissed her, reaching his tongue into her mouth and she opened it to admit him, wanting to offer no barriers. He tasted faintly of onions, much more strongly of tobacco, and the bristles of his beard scraped her face. He was breathing heavily, with a tiny rasp of mucus deep in his chest.
His fingers probed her flesh. Grace found that she was holding her breath, and then gasping in a lungful of the thick studio air.
Pilgrim fumbled with the last of the tiny pearl buttons.
‘Let me,’ she whispered. She wriggled out of the last wisps of her clothes, and then lay back again. He looked at her, his eyebrows drawn together and his lower lip jutting. His hand ran over her ribcage, the curve of her hip, as if she were a piece of sculpture. Grace found herself thinking of the pictures of Jeannie.
‘Won’t you take your clothes off too?’ she asked him. ‘I’m not your model today.’ The lightness and steadiness of her own voice surprised her, and she saw that he looked with a kind of admiration.
‘It’s your first time,’ he said, not asking a question.
‘There always has to be a first time.’
Pilgrim was very hairy. His arms and shoulders and chest were covered in dark hair. Peter Dennis had had smooth, very pale skin, and Julius and Jake had only been boys. Long ago, long ago. Pilgrim lay down beside her and took her in his arms. Grace knew there would be no running away now, no slipping back into the noisy currents of the Woodstock Road house or escaping across the water-meadows to where the other children called out for her in their game.
She knew what was supposed to happen now. She knew, but she had no idea.
He began to rub and stroke her. The vague, smothering feeling of wanting him that she had felt at the beginning had all disappeared, but now she felt a different, stronger but imperfectly localized sensation that made her want to wriggle, and roll her head. It was like glimpsing a face that ought to be perfectly familiar but was hidden by a thick veil, and so was tantalizingly obscured. She frowned, trying to identify it.
The feeling did not last long. Pilgrim rolled above her, and then nudged between her thighs. The smell of onions, tobacco and sweat intensified.
‘You’ll learn,’ he was mumbling. ‘You’ll soon learn, the goodness of it.’
It was painful, but not unbearably so. After a moment of stillness in which he grunted and nuzzled against her neck, Pilgrim began to move. Grace lay for a moment and then twitched her hips, willingly trying to echo what he did. His mouth curved into a smile against hers, and their teeth grated together. His breath was very hot in the back of her throat as he murmured to her.
‘That’s right. Oh, you’re a natural little chippy you are, my lady, my love, I could tell that from your mouth, that first day in your mama’s drawing room. Like a tiny red pillow, all soft, for a man to lie on.
‘Lift yourself up to me, like that.
‘Sweet, sweet, isn’t it? Like nothing in the world. They call it a little death, you know. To die a little …’
It was as if Grace’s head had been severed from her body. Her body with all the friction and pressure and stickiness belonged to someone else, and only her head was her own. She kept repeating to herself, I’m doing it, here and now, with this man. This hairy body. On this divan with the musty shawls. Is this what it is? Does it mean this, all the business of men and women?
Pilgrim was tired. He had had almost no sleep the night before, and he was barely sober now. The girl was lovely, but she was sexually naïve. Of course she was, he told himself, how could she be otherwise? And this was not the time to begin her education. There would be other times, he decided. More leisurely times, he would teach her what to do …
He stopped thinking, and gave himself up to enjoying her.
Grace held him in her arms, wondering if his groans meant that she was doing something wrong. She tightened her hold when he gave a defeated bellow and collapsed on top of her.
The movements stopped, and from that she knew it was over. She felt a small but definite pang of regret. That was it, she told herself. She had irrevocably crossed the divide from childhood into womanhood. The portentousness of the thought made her wish for a grander setting than the divan and a louder fanfare than Pilgrim’s shout.
Pilgrim moved sleepily, and then hauled himself up to look at her. He cupped one hand under her chin, and the
tenderness of the gesture consoled her.
‘That’s the first time out of the way,’ he excused himself. ‘The best thing about it is that it leads to the second and third.’
Grace allowed herself to be reassured. This was only a beginning, then. The impatient sensation that he had stirred in her slowly faded away, and she felt ordinary again.
Pilgrim lit a cigarette, and she settled in the crook of his arm. It was comfortable to lie with her cheek on his chest, listening to the muffled drum of his heartbeat. She rested one leg across his, looking down at the whiteness of her thigh against the black fur of his. It came to her that she was comfortable with her nakedness, calm and pensive, as Jeannie had looked in the pictures.
Grace smiled. She was here now, and she and Pilgrim were a part of one another. She loved him. She was glad to have crossed the divide.
He slid his hand over her ribs, to rest in the hollow of her waist. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked her.
To her surprise, Grace discovered that she was.
‘Let’s go to the Eiffel, then,’ Pilgrim said briskly.
He watched her putting on her clothes. ‘If we are going to do this again …’
‘I want to,’ Grace said. She was determined to be honest in her new maturity.
‘… If we are, you need to fix yourself up. Perhaps you could talk to Jeannie.’ Pilgrim was vague, leaving the suggestion hanging between them.
Grace nodded, having only a faint idea that he was referring to something women did, and knowing that she couldn’t possibly discuss anything of the kind with Jeannie. She presented her back to Pilgrim, so that he could do up her buttons for her.
The Eiffel was crowded.
Grace saw a quartet in evening dress at a table near the door, and recognized them as acquaintances from Belgrave Square. They must be having an early supper before seeing some dull show, she thought, and congratulating themselves on their daring in venturing into the raffish Eiffel Tower. She waved at them, and airily passed by on Pilgrim’s arm.
Pilgrim’s friend Nina and a crowd of others were sitting at his table. There was a chorus of greetings as chairs were moved up to make room for them. Grace looked around, and was faintly disappointed to see that there was no sign of Jeannie or the silver girl. But there were half a dozen others she recognized, and she saw that they all looked back at her.
