by Rosie Thomas
Julius’s head was bent under her hand, and she couldn’t see his face.
‘You could do much worse than marry Anthony Brock,’ Jake said. He felt that it was his role to be practical. He was thinking that Anthony would make an excellent husband for Grace, and a devoted father when the time came. Grace would be lucky to have him, and in the end she would probably come to love him exactly as her mother had learnt to love John Leominster. A well-disguised accident of paternity would soon be forgotten.
Grace nodded wearily. ‘I’m sure you are right,’ she said.
She had been clinging to the hope that somehow, against all rational principles, to lay her problem in front of the magic circle would be to find a solution. But there was no solution, of course. There was no such thing as magic, and the circle was broken open. She had snapped the link between Clio and herself. She could see it in her cousin’s face; she had made an enemy of Clio now.
The knowledge made Grace long for her support and friendship. She knew that she had brought herself to the edge of disaster and humiliation, and her only resort was to trap herself in a marriage with a man she didn’t love. All the bright future was extinguished, and in her loss she was crying out for Clio’s love and sympathy.
She looked over Julius’s head to where Clio leant in her dark blue velvet against the scarred old table.
‘Help me,’ she begged.
Clio had been utterly silent, but now a convulsion jarred her. In a single movement she flung herself across to the fender and leapt at Grace with her fingers hooked like claws, ready to tear her face.
‘Clio, Clio …’ Jake and Julius caught her and pinned her arms, dragging her away from Grace who never stirred from her perch on the fender.
Clio found that she was gasping for breath, and she wrenched incoherent words out between her sobs. ‘Help you? I hate you. I despise you, do you hear me?’
Grace’s expression was stiff and controlled. ‘Yes, I can hear you.’
As he looked from one to the other, Julius was horrified to see the wild eyes and wrenching strain of the Janus portrait.
Then Grace stood up, smoothing the pleated front of her lace dress. In her ordinary conversational voice she said, ‘Anthony is coming to spend Christmas at Stretton, you know. I think in a day or so it will be in order for you to congratulate us on our engagement.’ As she walked to the door she was thinking that if it was all a mistake, if there was no baby, she could break off the engagement and all would be well again. But with dull certainty she knew that there was no mistake. It would be better for the baby to be born a Brock than a bastard. It would be better for her to be Mrs Anthony Brock than nobody at all.
‘Goodnight,’ Grace said quietly. ‘Thank you, Jake. Thank you, Julius.’
Eight
Clio unwrapped a pottery plate and smiled at the sight of its decorations of flowers and fruit. She had bought it and its fellows from Omega Workshops, some time after her acquisition of the Gilman painting. The plates and the picture were her first extravagances, the first expressions of her own taste rather than her parents’, and she was very fond of them. They were still almost her only personal possessions apart from books and clothes.
She held the plate up for Jake to see. ‘Where shall we put this?’
Jake was unpacking medical textbooks and stacking them on shelves. He glanced perfunctorily at Clio.
‘It’s a plate, isn’t it? Put it in the kitchen.’
She smiled. Jake was uninterested in aesthetics. Still holding the plate she picked her way through the heaps of their separate belongings to the kitchen at the back of the house.
There was one tall window here, looking out over the chimneys and rooflines of Bloomsbury. Clio saw the roosting places of pigeons amongst iron gutters and soot-stained windowsills, and the dusty windows of the mews opposite, and by craning her neck to the left she could see the tops of the plane trees in Bedford Square. It seemed to her the most satisfactory vista she could possibly imagine. It had taken months of argument and persuasion to achieve it.
In front of the window was a stone sink and a wooden drainer with a zinc dish containing a sliver of soap. Clio turned on the tap and rinsed off the smears left by newspaper wrapping on the Omega plate. She dried it carefully, admiring the colours under the glaze, and put it on the bare pine table at the other side of the kitchen. When she ran her hand over the table top she found a film of dust and ancient crumbs, and even that made her happy because she knew that she would wash it down and it would be part of making a home for herself and Jake, here in four partly furnished rooms overlooking Gower Street.
‘Home,’ she said, trying the word for effect. She pulled out one of the ladder-back chairs from the table and sat down, swinging her feet up on to the seat of another. She could hear Jake in the next room, still arranging his books on the shelves. Jake was about to begin his clinical practice, the last stage on his way to becoming a doctor, at University College Hospital. The hospital was only a few yards further up Gower Street. It was Jake who had found this flat and who had made her see that, by putting together the small amount of Holborough money they had both inherited, they could afford to buy the lease.
But, Clio thought proudly, she had done the rest, the infinitely more difficult part, entirely by herself. She had secured herself a job. She was to start work on Monday morning at nine o’clock.
The thought of it was immediately exciting. She stood up and walked the nine paces from one end of the kitchen to the other, wrapping her arms around herself in pleasure. She was a professional woman, responsible for herself and answerable to nobody. The realization seemed both momentous and deeply romantic.
Two months ago, just after Jake had first mentioned the possibility of her sharing his Gower Street purchase, in the middle of confusion and indecision about her future and without giving herself time to think twice, she had taken the train from Oxford to London to see Max Erdmann in the Fathom offices in Doughty Street. She had found Max unusually sober, busy, and without any idea who she was. He had no recollection at all of having offered her a job months before, and his only aim had been to get her out of his chaotic office as quickly as possible in order to get on with compiling his overdue September issue.
To her surprise, Clio found herself standing her ground. ‘I need a job, Mr Erdmann. I can make myself useful.’
Max had barely lifted his head from a sheaf of galley proofs. ‘How do you know that? Can you type, for instance?’
Clio looked round at the drifts of paper, the overflowing wastebins and dusty boxes of Fathom back issues and subscription forms.
‘I’m very neat, very methodical. I can keep records and do filing and correct proofs.’
‘Can you type?’ Max sighed.
‘I can learn.’
‘Do that. Then come back and talk to me again. I won’t have a job for you, but talk is free.’
‘You need me,’ Clio had said boldly. ‘You should give me a job.’
And to her amazement she had found that employing insistent Grace-tactics worked. She had embarked on the latest in a series of arguments with Eleanor and Nathaniel, and enrolled herself in a Pitman’s course. Six weeks later she had emerged as a competent typist with a rudimentary grasp of shorthand. She presented herself again at the Fathom offices on the day that Max’s editorial assistant announced that she was going to have a baby.
‘I told you you needed me,’ Clio smiled.
‘Start in two weeks,’ Max responded, with the best grace he could manage. ‘You will be on a week’s trial.’
‘Thank you.’ Clio’s smile shone at him.
Whatever the job was like, she thought now, it couldn’t present anything like the difficulties she had already overcome to convey herself here, to Gower Street, to the beginning of her independent life.
The worst of it had been telling Nathaniel and Eleanor that she was giving up Oxford.
‘You want to work in some office, as a stenographer?’ Eleanor had murmured,
fanning herself with a copy of Fathom that Clio had brought home to show them. ‘Whatever for? I can understand that for some young women a job may be a necessity, but not for people of our sort. You can study your languages, and then you will marry and have your own children, just like Grace …’
‘No,’ Clio had said, as gently as she could. ‘I don’t want to do that. I need to live in the proper world. Jake and Julius do, don’t they?’
‘That is quite different.’
‘Because they’re men?’
Eleanor was shocked and distressed. ‘I don’t want you to turn into one of these strident suffragette women, Clio. Women are not the same as men, thank God. I have brought you up to be a lady, and a wife and mother.’
‘In that order?’ Clio demanded with sudden bitterness. ‘Is that all? What about to be a person, an individual, with my own rights?’
‘I am an individual. But I have never felt ashamed of having devoted my life to my husband and children. How can you imagine that you will assert your individuality by sitting in some office addressing envelopes for a complete stranger who could hardly compare with your father or your brothers, or your own future husband?’
Clio had never seen her mother so angry, nor guessed that out of her anger would come articulate pride. She thought that she hardly knew Eleanor at all, not as herself rather than just Mother, and that there was a distance between them that she had never noticed.
Grace was her nearest female kin, and now Grace was removed from her too.
The sudden sense of her own isolation seemed significant and possessed of a kind of glamour. It strengthened her resolve, and at the same time she felt a quiver of laughter at Eleanor’s idea of her entirely abstract future husband like a knight in armour outshining poor, dishevelled Max Erdmann. Perhaps I’ll marry Max, she thought, and had to swallow her smile before Eleanor could see and misinterpret it.
Humbly she said, ‘I didn’t mean to belittle what you have done. You are the best mother. I love you.’ She put her cheek against Eleanor’s, but Eleanor sat stiff and straight. ‘The war came between your childhood and mine. I don’t believe that we can go back to the way we were before. None of us can. But it won’t be so very much different for me, you know. I would have studied for three years and then found a job. I just want to begin a little earlier.’
Eleanor only said, in exactly the same way as she had concluded every lost argument throughout their childhoods, ‘You must talk to your father about it.’
It was much harder for Clio to attempt an explanation for Nathaniel. To Nathaniel, scholarship was the most important matter in the world, second only to his family. He could not comprehend Clio deliberately turning her back on it. She tried to make him understand the appetite and impatience that had grown within her following Pilgrim’s casual warning, and Grace’s marriage, but she knew she was only rearranging words that her father did not want to hear.
‘I want to begin properly, not to go on making ready for my life. I want to leave home, and Oxford, and start to fend for myself.’
Nathaniel watched her face. He had grown heavier, and he laced his fingers over his stomach in a gesture that was becoming characteristic. His beard spread over his chest.
‘Have you been so unhappy here?’
‘No, I didn’t mean that, of course I didn’t. I just want to …’
‘To go?’ His fingers spread and he shrugged. The gesture and his disappointment hurt her, but she kept her determination. ‘Go by all means, if that is what you want. But why turn your back on everything you have worked for? There is nothing wrong with London University, for example.’
‘I want to work at Fathom. I like the work they publish.’
It was inadequate, she knew that it was, but she couldn’t convey to Nathaniel the pull of a world that was so opposite to everything she had known. The regulars of Charlotte Street and the Eiffel were more interesting than female versions of the dons she had known all her life. Even the dust and litter of Max Erdmann’s office seemed preferable to the book dust of the Bodleian.
Nathaniel’s face was sombre. ‘It’s your life, Clio. I can’t force you to do anything against your will. I hope you will remember that your mother and I are always here to help you, if you need us.’
‘Thank you, Pappy.’
She had knelt down by his chair, ready to hug him, but he had only patted her shoulder. And then he had asked her, ‘Does this have anything to do with Grace’s sudden marriage?’
‘No,’ Clio said, almost truthfully. ‘Nothing.’
That was all. The only concession she had had to make was to agree with the Senior Tutor that her place would be held open for her for another year. But she knew that she would not be coming back.
Blanche had asked her to come and live at Belgrave Square, and Eleanor had been determined that she should accept. Clio had told both of them, firmly, that she would be living in Gower Street with Jake. Eleanor had reacted as if she was planning to move into barracks with a division of the Life Guards.
‘Who will chaperone you?’ she quavered.
Clio smiled at her. ‘Girls don’t need to be chaperoned any more. They catch buses and go to tea-shops and have bank accounts. Jake and I will look after each other.’
‘Who will marry you?’
As Grace had been married. Legitimized, placed in her niche in the world. Grace had an ambitious husband, a pretty little house, and soon she would be a mother. Clio did not want what had happened to Grace to happen to her. She couldn’t make her mother understand that she was not made anxious by there being so few men left to meet the needs of all the women of her generation. She smiled again.
‘Somebody will. Some day.’
As so she had reached Gower Street, and freedom. With Jake’s help she had borrowed or bargained for the minimum of domestic comforts, and they had moved in with their few possessions. Her Gilman picture hung over the narrow cast-iron grate in her bedroom, and her clothes were hidden behind a white curtain drawn across one of the corners of the room. The scenery was very like the bedsitting room in the picture. Clio thought that she might increase the likeness by painting the dingy walls blue, or maybe stencil them with borders of flowers and fruit. She could go out now, to Tottenham Court Road, to buy the colours.
She could do whatever she liked.
She called to Jake, ‘Do you want some tea?’
His face appeared round the door. ‘There isn’t any.’
Capably, smoothly, Clio told him, ‘I’m going out to buy some paint. I’ll shop for us on my way back.’ She was domestic, the commander of her own kitchen, as well as a woman of the world.
‘Get some muffins, or a cake or something, then, will you? A friend of mine is coming to tea, a girl. And Julius said he might look in too.’
Anxiety assailed her at once. Jake was generally accompanied by some woman, rarely the same one, but this would be the first guest to be entertained at Gower Street. Everything must be done perfectly. Clio abandoned the paint scheme and tottered back from the shops with enough food to entertain the entire hospital to tea.
Julius arrived, and teased her about the feast spread out on the hastily scrubbed kitchen table.
‘Be careful that you haven’t exchanged the yoke of scholarship for the treadmill of catering for Jake’s appetite.’
‘I’m happy to do it,’ Clio protested. ‘I like to see people eat.’
‘You sound like Grandmother Hirsh.’
‘I’m happy about that, too.’
Jake’s friend was a nurse from the hospital. She was Jewish, small and dark with wide, bright eyes. Clio guessed that she was a little older than Jake. Her name was Ruth Sherman. She shook Clio’s hand warmly but her glance was appraising, only softening when she turned to Jake. His eyes followed her wherever she moved.
Ruth was hungry. She explained to Clio that she was working a night shift and had only woken up an hour before. She would have to be on the ward at six and work until midnight before her brea
k.
‘And she does voluntary work in a free clinic, in her off-duty time,’ Jake said with pride. ‘We don’t have enough nurses like Ruth.’
‘Please, eat as much as you can,’ Clio begged her. ‘Julius has teased me enough about there being far too much.’
‘But there are two kinds of cake. If you only saw the food in the nurses’ hostel. This is wonderful.’
Clio turned pink with pleasure. This was how it should be, she thought, this was what she wanted. To have friends and family gathered informally around the table, eating and talking.
Jake and Ruth told hospital stories, completing one another’s sentences, smiling at each other. Clio began to understand that Ruth Sherman was more important to Jake than any of the other girls she had met with him. When the conversation turned serious, she listened attentively to what Ruth was saying, and saw that Julius did the same.
Ruth was an only child, born late to elderly parents who had wished for a boy. When they found they were the parents of a girl they had set out to prove to themselves and to Ruth that she was as good as a boy. They had never put anything out of reach because of her sex. Ruth had been brought up to believe herself the equal of any man. When she emerged into the world she was shocked to discover that her beliefs were not universally held. She had become a suffragette and a campaigner for women’s rights. After qualifying as a nurse she spent her spare time working in a clinic for the women who lived in the back streets beyond Euston.
‘They take care of everyone. Husbands, children. No one takes care of them,’ Ruth said. Her eyes glittered with indignation. ‘When women can vote, all women, we shall have a proper body of women MPs, not just Lady Astor in her furs. Then we shall be able to legislate for equality, for proper pay and benefits and medical care for mothers.’
Listening, Clio was impressed. She had thought it an amazing advance that married women over thirty had achieved the vote, and that two women had been elected to Parliament and one had taken her seat. But to Ruth, so much was clearly only an inadequate beginning. Clio felt herself warming to her, liking her after an initial wariness. ‘One of those strident suffragette women,’ Eleanor had said. Ruth was not strident at all, she was small and low-voiced, but she had the air of invincibility.
