Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  Ruth half-smiled. ‘Grace admires Hitler. Do you think she will put herself out politically on behalf of some German Jewish lawyer, even though you are in love with him? Particularly if you are in love with him?’ Ruth’s tongue was no less sharp that it had ever been.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Clio whispered. ‘I have to try everything, don’t I?’

  She stood up abruptly and walked round the table. Grace was too close, she could feel the painful chafing of all the links between them, buried in their history farther back than she could remember. They had parted in Berlin on dangerous ground. Clio would have to cross the ground again now, finding some stepping stones to reconciliation, to make Grace help her.

  What else was there to do?

  ‘I’ll ask whoever else I can. There’s the editor of The Times. Uncle John Leominster, the House of Lords. But Uncle John is ill, so it will have to be Hugo. And Hugo’s just an old Tory, who cares about nothing but death duties and the Milk Marketing Board. Nathaniel’s an Oxford don, the other people I know are literary journalists, critics, artists …’

  Clio stopped. All the solid weight of British society she had felt she could command in Berlin seemed to be dissolving around her. These were individuals, that was all, well-meaning but without collective power. How could she have imagined that she could command anything here? It came to her that she should have stayed in Berlin instead of removing herself, and she had to resist the immediate impulse to run out of Ruth’s house and away, back to the boat train.

  She walked around the table again. There was a pile of Jake’s shirts on a sagging chair in a corner, Luke’s flute in its case, one of Rachel’s paintings pinned to the wall. These evidences of a family life sharpened her sense of disconnection. She thought of Waltersroda and the forest, her room at Frau Kleber’s and the apartment with the blue and green paintings on the walls. Desperation closed around her throat like a noose.

  ‘Grace is my best hope,’ she said. ‘Grace went to tea with Hitler.’

  ‘Ach,’ was all Ruth would say, with her mouth twisting. She went back to the sink and the breakfast dishes.

  Later the children came home from their Hebrew lesson. Luke was diffident and almost silent in front of Clio, but the little girl was more confident and sat down with her aunt to talk. She was pretty, with a look of Eleanor about her. Clio noticed that Ruth was faintly disapproving towards her daughter, whereas she rubbed Luke’s hair and praised him for the work he had done at the class. Luke flushed uncomfortably and slipped away as soon as he could.

  It was late in the afternoon when Jake came in, although it had only been a morning surgery. Ruth shot a fierce glance at him, and then went on peeling potatoes.

  ‘Too many people, and the same old, unresolvable problems of poverty and ignorance,’ Jake said to Clio, evidently feeling that some explanation was called for. ‘Have you spoken to Grace?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m waiting for her to call back.’

  Jake sat down heavily at the end of the table. The Hirshes clearly lived their life in the dim basement kitchen.

  ‘I’m going to have a drink. Clio? Ruth?’

  The women shook their heads, but Jake took the whisky bottle out of a cupboard, and poured himself a measure. The telephone rang above the stairs and Ruth went to answer it.

  ‘If it’s a patient, I’m still out on calls,’ Jake shouted after her. He raised his glass to Clio with an ironic tilt of his wrist and drank a gulp. It was Grace on the telephone.

  When Clio came back Jake had refilled his glass.

  ‘I’m bidden to Vincent Street this evening,’ she told him.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Jake offered.

  ‘Will you really?’ Clio was relieved at not having to go alone. And the old childhood deference to Jake as the leader of the magic circle and arbiter of all they did still lingered on. Grace felt it too, she suspected, even if she would never admit it. It would be easier to ask for Grace’s help if Jake was there.

  Ruth said nothing. She only scooped half of the unpeeled potatoes into the pouch of her apron and returned them to the sack in the pantry.

  Grace was waiting for them, with Alice, in the Vincent Street drawing room. There were great sheaves of copper and russet chrysanthemums in all the vases, glowing like autumn bonfires against the pale cream of the walls. The siblings and cousins kissed, in pairs, as if following the movements of some formal dance. Grace was friendly to Clio, in her cool way. She did not offer or seem to expect any overt gesture of reconciliation. There was no sign of Cressida.

  Alice was wearing her improvised uniform of black shirt and mannish serge trousers, but Grace was dressed for dinner in an ivy-green satin dress with a wide, rustling skirt. She sat down on one of the cream-covered sofas and crossed her legs. Clio saw the sheen of silk on her smooth calves, and knew that Jake was watching it too. Her own lisle stockings were snagged, and she was wearing the same tweed suit that she had travelled in.

  The pettiness of the jealous irritation that she felt dismayed her, but it could not be denied. It was the relatively innocent white peak of an iceberg, protruding above submerged depths of darker resentment.

  Poor us, Clio thought, in a giddy moment. How could we ever have expected to be friends?

  The pointed toe of Grace’s suede shoe drew a circle in the air as she leant back against the cushions and sighed. ‘What a day. If I was cherishing any lingering illusions about the glamour of politics, the Nutrition Committee has dispelled them for good. Alice, darling, are you going to mix the drinks?’

  Alice sprung up and went to the tray. She made cocktails for them all, displaying considerable expertise with the silver shaker. Clio and Jake glanced at each other. Alice had never been noted for her willingness to help out in the Woodstock Road.

  ‘And so, what is it all about?’ Grace asked. ‘Jake?’

  ‘Not me,’ he answered. ‘Clio, and Berlin.’

  Grace listened while Clio told her story. Alice had begun by feigning lack of interest, yawning and glancing sideways at a magazine, but after a few minutes she sat up straighter and stared unblinkingly at Clio.

  ‘Nobody has any idea where they might have taken him,’ Clio said at the end. ‘I think it can only be one of the camps.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Believe me, I am,’ Grace told her. She remembered how happiness had made Clio look beautiful in Berlin. That had faded now. Clio looked her old self again, but there were tight, white lines around her mouth. Grace was tired after the minutiae of the Committee. She wanted to close her eyes, in some silent and empty room, instead of confronting Clio and the prospect of a political dinner.

  ‘What can I do?’ she asked. Her rings glinted as she make a little dismissive gesture.

  ‘Ask a question in the House,’ Clio answered. Her anxiety blew at Grace like a hot, stale wind.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Grace sighed. ‘A question? Do you know what the likely time lag is between a question and any kind of answer, even with a sympathetic Government? No, you don’t. Well then, it’s more likely to be months than weeks.’

  ‘What about a direct appeal to the Foreign Office?’ Jake said.

  ‘Rafael Wolf is a German national. He is also a single individual. I do know that in small matters the FO will give due weight and consideration, and the weighing and considering can go on and on until the original case is all but forgotten.’ ‘Or dead,’ Clio said. ‘You were in Berlin, Grace. You sat at Josef’s with us, and heard what happened to the lawyer who was taken away. He was beaten and tortured by your friends the Nazis, and left to die in a gutter. Do you remember that, or do you prefer not to? The same thing happens to Jews every day, only mostly no one ever sees or hears of them again. I don’t know what has happened to Rafael. I’m asking you to help us.’

  Grace turned to her and their eyes met. Clio thought she saw the glint of satisfaction now. Grace had power, positive power that was no longer anything to do with brothers and cousins and childish rivalry, and she was
pleased with it.

  ‘You won’t do anything, then,’ Clio said. In the warm and comfortable room her words fell like pellets of ice.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Grace was thinking of her dinner engagement. There was an opportunity to show what she could do, much more immediate than tabling a question or following the proper tortuous diplomatic procedures. ‘You will have to let me see what I can do in my own way.’

  In her corner Alice suddenly made an impatient noise. ‘He is a Jew, for goodness’ sake. The Führer is right, they should all be rounded up and shot.’

  No one spoke.

  Alice had made her pronouncement as if she were a child announcing that she would no longer eat green vegetables, or say her prayers at bedtime. Clio and Jake had heard the same defiant tone a thousand times before, and they remembered Nathaniel’s amused and indulgent responses. ‘Your hair will fall out, Alice, and who will dance with you then? If you don’t say your prayers, how can they be answered?’

  They looked at her now as they always had done, at the over-indulged child who struck absurd attitudes to gain the attention of her elders. It was hard for them to believe that the little girl had changed into this political fanatic.

  Jake frowned at her. ‘That’s enough of that, Alice.’

  It was the wrong response. Alice did not want to be dismissed as if she was still the baby of the Babies.

  She sprang out of her chair and went to stand on the hearthrug, with her arms folded. She wore her party badge at the throat of her blouse. To Clio, she looked as heartbreakingly young as the Berlin boys in their woollen swimming costumes on the beach at Wannsee.

  ‘Mosley says that the Jews are responsible for all the economic ills and half of the crime in this country today,’ Alice parrotted. ‘Not the good Jews, like Pappy, but the greedy and crooked ones.’

  Jake leapt to his feet. He was a head taller than Alice and she shrank a little as he loomed over her.

  ‘What you need, Alice, is a damned good hiding. I’ve half a mind to give it to you as well.’

  Alice wriggled past him, scarlet in the face with anger and injured pride. ‘Grace …’

  Grace frowned at her. ‘Don’t be unnecessarily provocative, Alice.’

  Alice drew herself up. ‘What do any of you know? Or really believe in? Even you, Grace. Nothing can be put right in this country without provocation. Without purging what is rotten and reinforcing what is strong and right.’

  Jake advanced on her. His open hand looked meaty and heavy.

  ‘Don’t you touch me.’

  Alice’s own hand flew to her throat, covering her pin. She ducked away and ran to the door. The slam of it behind her reverberated through the house.

  The three of them left behind waited uncomfortably, without looking at each other. Clio felt accusations rising inside her – your influence, your political friends – but she bit them back, and stared at the fiery mass of the flowers. There was a faint echo of the first slam from somewhere higher up, and then silence.

  Jake said, ‘Alice needs to grow up.’

  Grace answered with relief, ‘That’s it exactly. She is only half formed, full of undigested ideas. Most of the things she says she doesn’t mean. She’s confused, but very loving. Passionate, really. I’m very fond of her, you know.’

  ‘Perhaps this isn’t the best place for her to be living,’ Clio said. ‘Passionate and unformed as she is.’

  Grace looked steadily back at her. ‘Why not? She is happy here.’

  ‘And she is twenty-one,’ Jake reminded them. The tone of his own voice as he had reprimanded her came back to him. ‘We still treat her as if she is a baby, all of us. Pappy especially. She has to keep demonstrating that she isn’t, with her absurd ideas.’

  Alice had been a plump, toddling creature once, with corkscrew curls and a smile that threatened to split her fat cheeks. He remembered her in the hot, still summer before the war. She had seemed to him then to be the symbol of innocence that was threatened by the coming violence. That was the summer of the picnic, and the corner of the field hidden in the angle of the hawthorn edge.

  They had all been so innocent then. Grace and Clio were hardly out of their school pinafores. His own tortured lust for Grace seemed inconceivable now that they were adults with their different fears and preoccupations, but he knew how that early longing had affected him. It had left him with a fascination for the mystery of women; the need for different conquests and the melancholy sweet triumph of each discovery.

  Jake felt a shiver of apprehension, and at the same time the strong and enduring beat of love for his siblings and cousins.

  Grace stood up, sweeping the folds of her ivy-green skirt behind her. Jake watched her, and Clio watched Jake.

  ‘I am dining with the Astors this evening,’ Grace said. ‘There may be someone there I can talk to about Rafael.’

  They were dismissed.

  Grace came down with them. At the door they kissed again, making the formal exchange of cousinly affection, but Grace kept her hand on Clio’s arm afterwards.

  ‘I will do whatever I can,’ she promised. ‘I could see in Berlin that … you loved him. You are lucky in that, at least.’

  Jake drove Clio back across London. Jake had a car now, a dusty black Riley with creased brown leather seats that gave off a rich tobaccoey smell.

  ‘Do you love him?’ Jake asked.

  Clio’s head was turned away in the dark shelter of the car. She was watching the sooty, familiar streets. She said, very softly, ‘Yes. I couldn’t have imagined, before, how loving him would change everything. Even inanimate things, chairs and tables, ugly city corners, take on a kind of importance. As if they are painted with a layer of fresh light, different colours. Every dull detail takes on a new significance, just because he exists.’

  ‘I remember that,’ Jake said.

  Clio hunched forward in her seat. She thought of Rafael all the time, in every waking minute, and inseparable from the thoughts was the speculation about where he might be, what he might be suffering now, at this same minute. At night, when she was asleep, the dreams were worse. Fear and loss ballooned suddenly and crazily inside her, making a churning hollow of nausea beneath her diaphragm. What had once seemed simple was now a nexus of pain, fracturing and spinning away to form new constellations of terror and bewilderment.

  ‘I don’t even know if he is still alive,’ she whispered.

  The longing to move, to whirl out of the car in search of Grace, the Foreign Secretary, the King himself, possessed her again. But her limbs felt leaden, so heavy that she couldn’t even lift her arms.

  ‘He’s alive. He’ll come back again.’ Jake spoke without the resonance of conviction.

  They came to the end of Oxford Street and Jake turned northwards, up Tottenham Court Road, and then swung left again. They passed Pilgrim’s old studio in Charlotte Street.

  ‘There’s not much point in going home,’ Jake said. ‘Ruth won’t exactly be keeping dinner hot for us. We might as well go to the pub.’

  He took her to the Hope, round the corner from the Fitzroy. There was a little supper bar in one corner and Jake came back to Clio at the table with glasses of beer and two plates of sausages and peas.

  It was utterly familiar, from hundreds of other evenings spent here and in similar places, but at the same time Clio felt that it was strange, as if it belonged to another part of her life that she had left sealed, in some remote and irrelevant past. She wondered what she could do, tomorrow and all the time after that, if Rafael never came back. The smell of sausages and beer was making her feel sick.

  ‘Clio? Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ To deflect Jake’s concerned gaze she said quickly, ‘What do you think about Alice?’

  Jake took a long pull at his beer, and then wiped the froth from his beard with the back of his hand. Clio found that she needed to concentrate hard on the framed picture of the King and Queen hanging over the bar.

  ‘Alice should a
rrange to fall in love with some robust and available young man as soon as possible. All this obsession with fascism and Mosley and uniforms is a clear and simple case of thwarted sex drive.’

  Clio pushed the plate of food as far away as she could. ‘Jake, do you believe that everything in life is to do with sex?’

  He laughed, but there was not much humour in the laughter. ‘If only it were. How simple life would be.’

  Grace was shown into the dining room of Lord and Lady Astor’s house in St James’s Square. In the group of guests closest to hand, before Nancy came forward to greet her, she saw Lord Lothian, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Sir John Simon, the Foreign Secretary. Both men bowed to her, their chins dipping over their white ties. It was evidently to be a political evening of the most serious kind.

  Lady Astor swept across the room. She was in her mid-fifties now, but she had lost none of her strong American good looks. She was wearing ropes of enormous pearls, and a black velvet high-necked gown. Her sharp blue eyes fixed on Grace.

  ‘Grace, my dear gel, here you are at last.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Grace said with surprising meekness. ‘I had to receive a deputation.’

  ‘Come with me at once. There is someone you must meet. Not you, Philip.’

  Grace put her hand on her hostess’s arm. ‘First of all, may I ask you a favour?’

  Nancy cocked her head. ‘Yes darlin’, you may. Anythin’ you like, so long as it’s legal.’

  Grace murmured to her.

  ‘Now, you do realize that will destroy my placement, don’t you?’

  ‘If it were possible, Nancy, I’d be more than grateful.’

  ‘Hmm. I’ll see. Let me introduce you to this charmin’ man, first.’

  Grace allowed herself to be propelled forwards. Lady Astor would have denied it vehemently, but she was an ardent matchmaker.

  When the time came, Grace went into dinner on the arm of the charming man. The Astors’ dining room was laid for forty people, and it was a candlelit blaze of crystal and silver. As soon as she reached her chair, Grace glanced sideways to see the name on the place-card to her right. Then she smiled, looking down the length of the shining table to Nancy sitting as straight as a ruler at the far end.