by Rosie Thomas
She slept much later than usual, after the first untroubled night since Rafael’s disappearance. When she did wake up, it was to find Nathaniel sitting on the edge of the bed looking down at her. He had taken hold of her hand to rouse her.
She became fully conscious, at once. Clio struggled to sit upright.
‘What it is? What?’
‘I am afraid it is bad news. Your uncle John died quietly in his sleep last night.’
I thought it was worse. I thought …
‘Uncle John. Oh, Pappy, poor Aunt Blanche.’
The funeral was at Stretton, on a day of thick November drizzle. John Leominster was buried alongside his parents and grandparents in the family vault at the side of the little estate church. The pews were filled with neighbours and tenants, and his coffin was carried by his sons and his estate workers. Blanche sat at the front of the church, a heavy veil covering her face, with Grace and Phoebe supporting her on either side. She looked smaller than the statuesque woman Clio remembered.
All the Hirshes were at the funeral except for Julius, and Ruth, who stayed at home with the children in Islington. For once, Alice’s black shirt and beret did not invite any comments.
When it was over, Jake and Clio and Grace withdrew to the old schoolroom. No one suggested it; they were drawn there as if by gravity. The battered desks with their carved initials were still in place. Clio supposed they were waiting there for Hugo’s children, if the new Earl of Leominster were ever to marry and father any.
CBAGH. She remembered the feel of the penknife in her hand, the way the pearl handle had bitten into her palm as she scratched away. CEACS. Grace’s initials were more elegantly carved.
The waistband of her black costume skirt felt uncomfortably tight and she reached under her coat to undo the top button. Clio’s mouth curled slightly. She didn’t think there was much likelihood that her own son would sit here in his turn, playing and plotting with his Stretton cousins.
Jake was watching her. ‘You are going to be showing soon,’ he said.
Clio had told him the news the night before, when Eleanor and Nathaniel were sitting with Blanche. His concern had been medical first, and practical thereafter.
‘When is it due?’
‘In May.’
‘Are you getting proper attention?’
‘I went to see David Douglas.’
‘He’s good enough. What about everything else?’
‘It will be Rafael’s baby. Pappy and Mama and Aunt Blanche and Hugo and Miles and everyone else will have to accept that.’
Jake and Clio looked at each other. ‘Hugo doesn’t matter a toss, and I don’t suppose Aunt Blanche does either. Miles has forfeited the right to any consideration. But it will hurt the parents, you know. Mama especially,’ Jake said.
‘I can’t help it,’ Clio responded, setting her mouth in a straight line. ‘There isn’t any other way to do it.’
While they were still talking the door opened. Cressida materialized in the doorway, but she had clearly been expecting the room to be empty.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in confusion. ‘I didn’t think anyone ever came up here.’
Jake smiled at her. ‘Is this your retreat too? We used always to think of it as our place, when we were children.’
In her black dress Cressida looked taller and thinner, and the moons of flesh that had padded her face were beginning to dissolve, to reveal the bones beneath. She was no longer a dumpy little girl.
‘Look,’ Grace said. She took Cressida’s hand and led her to the desks, pointing to the carvings with her red fingernail.
Clio saw something then that she had never noticed before. It was Grace who was the eager one. Grace wanted Cressida to see this evidence of her own girlhood, and she watched her daughter’s face for the reflections of her feelings. But Cressida looked closed-in, her newly clear features walled with a kind of stubborn endurance.
‘I know. I’ve seen them.’ She removed her hand and put it out of reach in the pocket of her dress. Grace shrugged slightly and turned away.
Clio thought of her own child, enclosed within the bands of muscle and mysterious amniotic sea. It will be different, for you and me, she promised. A silent dialogue had begun between them. The baby answered her with the powerful assertion of his existence and his growth, every hour of every day.
Cressida said with a faint bleat of accusation, ‘Grandma is crying. Aunt Phoebe and Aunt Eleanor are looking after her.’
‘I had better go,’ Grace sighed.
Left alone with Jake, Clio pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the window. The great trees of the park retained only a few flags of leaves, and the grass was already bitten with cold.
‘I will tell them,’ she said.
Jake sighed. ‘On your own head,’ he warned her.
It was not easy to find Nathaniel and Eleanor alone, in the great house filled with Stretton children who circled numbly round Blanche and her grief. But in the evening, after dinner, Clio discovered her parents sitting together in the salon. They had withdrawn there with their coffee after Blanche had been put to bed with a sedative.
It was a chill room heavy with gilt and slippery damask, where the Sargent portrait of the Misses Holborough forever confronted the blank panel intended for Pilgrim’s picture. Clio sipped from the cup that Eleanor had handed her and studied the Sargent. The innocent girls posed on the love seat in their cream and sky-blue satins and silk belonged to an age so distant that it was almost forgotten. The Misses Holborough of Holborough Hall were Victorians. The recollection gave Clio a shivery premonition that what was coming would be painful for all of them.
She drew up an ottoman that was itself padded and buttoned like a Victorian matron.
‘Pappy, Mama, I have to tell you something.’
Eleanor’s fingers came up to her mouth. Her eyelids were already swollen from weeping with her sister. Clio began, haltingly at first and then with growing fluency, to tell her parents what had happened in Germany.
Her premonition was correct.
Eleanor was frightened and deeply shocked and disappointed, and the confusion of her feelings found its expression in anger. Clio could not remember ever having seen her mother so angry.
‘You may not do this. You are my daughter.’
‘It is already done,’ Nathaniel said sadly.
Eleanor would listen to no one. ‘Who is this man? He is a Jewish activist, interned by the Nazis …’
Nathaniel put a warning hand on her arm.
‘I am proud of him,’ Clio said quietly. ‘And you would be too, if you knew him.’
‘Proud? After he has done this to my daughter? I tell you I would not even spit in his direction.’
‘Mama, don’t say things that you will regret …’
‘I have nothing to regret. I have been a good wife and a patient mother. And you, you are a married woman also. You have responsibilities, as I have to your father. A marriage is for life, not for a whim, to be thrown off when it gives you a moment’s displeasure.’
Clio spread her fingers over the clammy, cold stuff of the ottoman. She was searching for the right words to throw a precarious bridge over this chasm of a generation. It seemed vital that there should be some link, even if it was only a thread of honesty, a gossamer filament from a spider’s web.
‘I made a mistake when I married Miles. I have paid for that mistake, believe me. And now I have fallen in love, and I am expecting this man’s baby. I want my child to know his proper antecedents and to be proud of them, as he should be. I want to bring him up to his proper heritage.’
Eleanor stared at her. Her mouth hung a little open in her distress, her lower lip shiny with spittle or tears.
‘Not under my roof,’ her mother whispered.
Clio bowed her head. ‘I believe that women should be free to accept responsibility for themselves. This is my decision. Can you at least allow me the right to decide my own life?’
‘Not in t
his shameful way,’ Eleanor said.
Clio understood, then, that it was Miss Holborough of Holborough Hall who spoke to her, across the divide of a century. Eleanor was the daughter of a country baronet who had daringly married out of her class and her world, but who yet had lived every day of her life within the strict bounds of her parents’ morality. Eleanor had never dreamed or wished to break out of those bounds, and Clio knew that she could not blame her for her anger at her daughter’s default.
It will be different for us, she promised the baby. Every minute he was growing, tiny fingers sprouting from budded fists of flesh, fingernails like translucent rosy shells …
She edged forward on the hard ottoman. She wanted suddenly to lay her head in her mother’s lap, to have her stroke her hair and soothe her, as she had done when she was a little girl.
‘I won’t shame you,’ Clio promised in a calm, even voice. ‘I won’t walk down the Woodstock Road with my illegitimate child. I shall go away until after he is born, and stay until the circumstances are forgotten. And if … if Rafael doesn’t come back to us, then I shall look after his son as he deserves to be looked after. I shall count myself lucky to have that much of the father.’
The note of bravado grew tremulous, at the end. But Eleanor didn’t hear it.
‘How will you live? Cut off from your family and friends, all the life that you have been brought up and educated to? How will you manage?’
‘I will manage,’ Clio said.
Eleanor saw then that she could, and would. She stood up, stiff-backed, and walked out of the room.
When the door closed Nathaniel leant forward very slowly and took Clio’s hands between his own. ‘She will come round, you know,’ he told her.
‘Pappy, I’m sorry to hurt you both.’ Clio was sobbing now. He put his arms around her and held her against him.
‘I think you are very brave, Clio. But I am sorry, too. I can’t pretend that I am not.’
Clio cried, ‘But I am glad I am having the baby. If I didn’t have Rafael’s baby I would have nothing.’
‘Where will you go?’ he asked gently.
Without thinking Clio answered, ‘To Paris. I have always wanted to live in Paris. Pilgrim and Isolde are there, so I won’t be alone. And I have always liked Pilgrim.’
Paris was between Berlin and London. Paris was a cosmopolitan city, where she could be anonymous and invisible. The idea took root and began to grow.
‘I will help you as much as I can,’ Nathaniel said.
The apartment was on the Left Bank, up the Boulevard St Michel, near the Jardins de Luxembourg. It was high up, on the fourth floor, with views from its mansard windows over purplish slate cliffs, and more windows, and the distant peaks of roofs descending towards the river.
There were two rooms, misshapen under the eaves, under-furnished and chilly in cold weather, but full of moving patterns of light. Clio established herself in this place like an animal building her nest. She hung the little blue oil painting of a bedsitting room on one wall, and set out her new typewriter on the table by the window.
She told the concierge that her husband was a Jew who had been interned by the Nazis in Berlin.
‘Ma pauvre petite,’ the woman murmured. ‘Et vous êtes enceinte, aussi …’
In this place, half-hypnotized by the swimming light and by the faint butterfly strokes of her baby, Clio began to write.
She started with slow sentences and hesitant paragraphs. Then slowly the paragraphs began to move, dancing under their own momentum, and they shivered and began to knit together, twining more closely and insistently and running faster over the blank pages, until she stood back almost breathless with the speed of it. The story grew out of her and then ballooned away, out of her control as if it were no longer part of her, like a baby being born.
The writing became Clio’s novel about herself and Rafael, and the Café Josef and Wilmersdorf and the burning of the Reichstag. It was published, not then but later, as Berlin Diary, and of all the books she was to write it was the best, and the one for which she was remembered.
Winter turned into spring while she was writing it. She saw Pilgrim and Isolde, and went for slow walks beside the river where the willows on the tip of the Île St Louis grew faintly green. The concierge looked out for her, and she became part of the life in the little cobbled street between the boulangerie and the newsstand where she bought her foreign newspapers. The patron of the corner café called after her when she passed, and she stopped to talk to her neighbours when she saw them. But mostly Clio was content to be alone.
And then, in March, there was the telephone call.
The concierge called up the stairs to her, as Frau Kleber used to do. Clio climbed awkwardly down. Her pregnancy had made her no longer quite certain of the dimensions of her own body. The old-fashioned black telephone was housed in a dim cubicle at the back of the narrow hall.
‘Clio, it is Grete here.’
Grete was crying. At first Clio could not distinguish the words. And then her fingers closed around the warm black bakelite with a sharp and pure spasm of joy.
‘He is out. They let him out. He wouldn’t stay here, even for one hour. He is on his way to you, Clio.’
Clio went slowly back up the stairs. Her face was wet, and she could hardly see her way. She sat down on her bed, watching the thin ribbons of sunlight move across the ceiling, waiting for him.
At last, she never knew how many hours later, he knocked at her door. When she opened it she saw a gaunt man with a speckled grey beard, the hollows in his face like fist-marks. But he held out his hands to her, and it was Rafael. He looked, for a long moment, as if he were seeing for the first time. And then he knelt down and put his arms around her, with his face pressed to her stomach.
‘They let me out. They just put me outside the gates, in the early morning, with my papers.’
Clio knelt too, and touched the sunken contours of his face with the tips of her fingers. ‘It must have been Grace’s doing. It must have been.’
They clung to each other then, blind and deaf.
‘I love you,’ Rafael said.
‘I love you,’ she repeated.
Clio’s baby was born in Paris, in May 1934. It was a girl, although she had never doubted that she was carrying a boy.
Clio wanted to give her a German name, but Rafael would not let her. In the end they named her Rosemary Ruth, but from the day of her birth she was called Romy.
Eighteen
London, 1936
The route of the march led along Oxford Street towards Hyde Park. At Hyde Park Corner, the Leader would address the crowd. Alice marched with her head up, swinging her arms to the rhythm of the pounding feet.
Behind the big plate-glass windows they passed were bright displays of summer fashions, but Alice didn’t even glance at them. When she did turn her head a little to one side it was to see if she could catch a glimpse of her own reflection in the shimmering glass. But mostly she stared straight in front of her, at the Union flag and the lightning-flash BUF banners proudly floating at the head of the march. Mosley was there, heading the column, and her thoughts were fixed on him.
She let herself be carried along by the singing and the chanting. The patriotic songs seemed to enter right into her soul, burning her with images of freedom and England. It was no effort to keep on marching, even though they had already come a long way. She was buoyed up by excitement, and her feet seemed to float over the hard road.
Alice loved marches and meetings. She attended them all, or as many as her work for Grace allowed her to. These fascist gatherings were like sharp peaks sticking up out of the monotonous plain of her life. They gave meaning and perspective to what was otherwise dull, and monotonous, and puzzling.
The ordinary business of life did puzzle her. Alice suspected that she was not quite like other girls. She was not like Tabby or Phoebe, for instance, and certainly nothing like the daughters of her parents’ friends with whom she had come out
, who were interested in nothing but potential husbands and dances and clothes. Alice was interested in her Cause, and she pursued it with greedy anxiety. Because if she did not have that, she thought, what else would there be?
Very occasionally, with a kind of numb and clumsy regret, Alice would feel that it might perhaps be more comfortable after all to be like the other girls. It might be pleasant to have a suitor, and then maybe a wedding, and children and a home of her own. But then at once she would feel guilty, as if she had betrayed the beloved cause and the Leader himself. She would take down her photographs, or her party handbooks, and fix her attention on those.
And on days like today, then she had no doubts at all. It was glorious to be here, marching, and she felt sorry for anyone who was not.
They came to Oxford Circus, and streamed through the channel that the police created for them. There were shouting and fist-waving protesters behind the shoulders of the police, but Alice was used to that. One of the policemen walking on the flank of the march was keeping pace with her, she noticed. He kept looking at her. He had a very young, pink face under his helmet. She looked ahead, resolutely denying his attention.
At last they came to Hyde Park Corner. The marchers flowed into the park and surrounded a flag-draped podium. Alice dodged and squirmed her way forward, closer and closer to the edge of the platform until she was standing almost directly beneath it. The hecklers had closed in too, and the chanting began to rise between the two factions. The antifascists called their taunts:
Hitler and Mosley, what are they for?
Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war!
and the supporters in response, set up a drowning roar, ‘Mosley, Mosley!’ Alice crooned the Leader’s name, her eyes closed and her arm raised in the fascist salute. She forgot the policeman, and everything else except what was happening on the platform.
Mosley climbed up the steps ready to speak. He came closer to the microphone until his mouth almost touched it. There was a sigh from the crowd, like a gust of wind rolling through the trees.
His subject was peace, and the terrible threat of war, and the Jews.
