by Rosie Thomas
‘Cress, Tabby, hello too.’
The drawing room felt warm and welcoming. Romy was running in circles on the oriental rug. The house might almost have been as it always was, before they all grew up.
‘Romy has been good,’ Cressida said.
‘I have. I ate all my lunch, and I had egg for my tea and Cressy took me to the Parks.’
‘You lucky girl. You haven’t missed me, then?’
‘Not badly much.’
Clio was glad. It worried her that she and Romy lived in too close proximity, and that in Rafael’s absence they filled too large a space in one another’s lives. She said, ‘Daddy would be pleased with you.’
Behind her, Jake and Tabitha glanced at one another.
‘Time for a drink,’ Jake announced quickly. ‘Sherry? Has Pappy got any Scotch, Tabby, d’you think?’
‘Where are they both, anyway?’
Clio sat down on the sofa beneath Pilgrim’s portrait and drew Romy on to her lap. It was a pleasure to come home, to the house that she still thought of as home, and to find Jake filling the thin and over-quiet air of the old place with talk.
‘Aunt Eleanor is resting and Uncle Nathaniel had a seminar, but he’ll be in soon,’ Cressida answered.
Jake had found the whisky bottle before they heard Nathaniel’s book bag thumping down on to the tiles in the hall.
‘Pappy!’
‘Grandpappy!’ Romy scrambled down from Clio’s lap and ran to find him. A moment later Nathaniel came in with the child in his arms.
Nathaniel seemed physically smaller and less of a dominant presence than he once had been. His beard was more white than grey, and his shoulders had rounded into a stoop. It was Jake who looked like the tribal leader now. But there was a close link between Romy and her grandfather.
They searched for one another when they came into a room, and they were always happy in one another’s company. Nathaniel was whispering in Romy’s ear.
‘Mummy!’ she shrieked. ‘Grandpappy says I can stay up for proper dinner with him and you if I’m seen and not heard.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, Clio, do let her. She had a sleep this afternoon.’
‘Cressida, you traitor.’
‘I want to stay up too,’ Jake shouted. ‘I shall scream if I’m not allowed to. Pappy, I will.’
‘Be quiet, Jake.’
The noise was like it used to be. Eleanor sailed into the midst of them. She had changed for dinner, as she always did, and her silky skirts rustled around her. She had never cut her hair, and it was wound up in elaborate coils on top of her head and secured with tortoiseshell combs. Out of long-standing habit too she greeted her husband first, putting her hands on his arms and reaching up to be kissed. Then she made the rounds of her children and they gathered in a circle around her.
‘Can I stay up, Grandma? Can I, can I?’
‘Yes darling, of course you can.’
‘I am overruled,’ Clio sighed, without regret. It gave her quiet pleasure to see Romy here with her family.
When Clio had first brought her child home to Oxford Eleanor had been caught between the need to uphold her Victorian morality and her natural warmth towards all of her family. She had tried to keep her granddaughter at arms’ length, but then Clio had begun to notice how her eyes followed Romy’s blonde head. Romy was growing to look more and more like her father. There was none of the Hirsh darkness about her.
And then, very gradually in the long months after Alice’s death, Romy had begun to provide a prop for Eleanor and Nathaniel. Some of her energy and brightness had seemed to pass into them by slow osmosis. She became her grandparents’ favourite and their safe focus.
‘Shall we go in?’ Eleanor said tranquilly. Her husband took her arm and Jake bent down to offer his to Romy. Clio and Tabby and Cressida followed on behind them.
Romy was given a place of honour at the foot of the table, boosted almost to adult height by three cushions.
Looking across at her Clio was visited by a memory of Alice, sitting in just the same place. She was wearing a white dress, and a gold-paper crown on her black wire curls.
It must have been a birthday party; there were jellies and ribbons and fondant sweets on the white linen cloth.
Alice’s sixth birthday. The day that Grace had been discovered upstairs in Captain Dennis’s bedroom. Alice’s sixth birthday.
There had been the terrible quarrel with Grace.
You have to have everything, don’t you? Clio could hear her own voice, smothered and small with her anger. You have to have everything, don’t you? I hate you, Grace.
‘Clio, are you all right?’ It was Tabby, looking at her with concern. ‘You’ve gone white.’
‘Have I? Yes, I’m all right. I felt dizzy for a minute. Pass me the water jug, could you?’
Family dinner, like so many family dinners before it. Jake and Nathaniel vociferously arguing. Girls with tidied hair and clothes. Alice waving her knife and fork at the end of the table, spilling food on the cloth, and Eleanor rebuking her.
Not Alice, but Romy.
After dinner, there would be the wireless news. They would hear if Hitler had attacked Czechoslovakia, and brought the threat of war closer. On her way to the train at Paddington Clio had seen a woman carrying a new gas-mask in its case. She could remember the start of the last war, and the half-heard and half-guessed adult anxieties that had whispered in the house.
Fearfully she looked down the table again, to Romy in her place of honour. What would happen to Rafael, in Germany, if the war came?
‘Clio?’
Someone had asked her a question. She smiled, and murmured an apology. It had been Eleanor.
‘Darling, I only asked about your meeting with your publisher.’
Jake was chewing vigorously, showing his red mouth. He pointed his fork at her.
‘Mummy’s written a book,’ Romy contributed wisely.
‘Yes, how is the famous novelist?’
‘Not very famous yet. I went through the proof corrections, and he explained how much it costs nowadays to reset a line of type. It sounds as if I shall end up in debt to Randle & Cates, rather than the other way around. Unless they sell more than a dozen copies, that is.’
‘We’ll buy one each. I’m sure Oswald Harris will take another. There, you are almost in profit already.’
Clio joined in the laughter. She wouldn’t tell them that she had seen Miles. There was, in any case, nothing to say.
Towards the end of the meal Romy’s head began to droop. Nathaniel hoisted her off her chair, leaving Alice’s place empty. He held her on his knee and she fell asleep with her head against her grandfather’s shirtfront.
Eleanor rolled up her napkin and put it neatly through its silver ring. ‘We’ll have our coffee in the drawing room, shall we? Mary will have put the tray in there.’ Eleanor had only a cook and one housemaid to help her run the diminished household.
They went through, with Nathaniel carrying Romy in his arms. He put her on the sofa and covered her with a Paisley shawl.
‘I’ll take her home soon,’ Clio said, without moving. It was comfortable in the armchair with her coffee cup. Cressida had gone to the piano and was picking out a waltz with Jake humming over her shoulder. Tabby was sitting under the lamp with her sewing.
‘Play some more, Cressida,’ Nathaniel murmured. With his head back against the cushions he was ready to doze.
In his study the telephone rang.
‘I’ll go,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s Blanche.’
Clio and Jake smiled at each other. The telepathic closeness between the twins seemed to strengthen rather than diminish with age.
Eleanor was gone for a long time. Cressida played and Jake sang a sentimental Victorian ballad, and then Tabby put down her work and joined in a duet. Nathaniel had dropped off to sleep, but Clio laughed and applauded.
‘I don’t think you can possibly guess what the news is.’
They looked up to see Eleanor stand
ing in the doorway.
‘It isn’t the war?’ Cressida whispered.
But Eleanor’s eyes were bright. ‘Not bad news, darling. Good news.’
‘I give up,’ Tabby sighed. ‘Tell us at once.’
‘Hugo is engaged to be married.’
The chorus of amazement woke Nathaniel up. Hugo seemed to have settled long ago to a bachelor life, absorbed in the management of his estate and in county affairs. He seldom went beyond the margins of his own land. It had long been assumed in the family that Thomas and Thomas’s children were his heirs.
‘Who is she?’
‘Hugo doesn’t have women.’
‘Hugo has farm plans and harvest festival suppers with the farmhands.’
‘Well, he has a fiancée now, Jake, whatever you might have to say.’
‘Who is she, Mama, for goodness sake?’
‘She is a Miss Lucy Frobisher.’
‘Sounds like a nursery rhyme. Or a tale by Beatrix Potter.’
‘Frobisher? Weren’t there some Stretton neighbours called Frobisher?’ Clio asked. ‘I remember Uncle John used to talk about hunting or not hunting over their land.’
‘Yes. She is the younger daughter of some good Shropshire people. She is twenty-three years old, Blanche says, and very pretty and suitable. Hugo has known her since she was a child, of course, but they have only very recently fallen in love.’
‘The old devil. He’s well over forty.’
‘Only seven months older than you, Jake, as you perfectly well know. The age difference between them is less than there was between Blanche and John.’
‘Hugo’s a catch for any girl. She’ll be the Countess of Leominster.’
‘He’s chosen a good breeder, I hope,’ Jake said seriously. Cressida laughed behind her hand.
Nathaniel laced his fingers across his chest. ‘I suppose there’ll have to be a wedding, now.’
‘It’s the usual procedure, Pappy.’
‘Blanche says they will be having a big wedding in the New Year. At Stretton, of course. And a ball, and dinners for estate people and tenants. It will be a great deal of work for her, but she is determined that it will be done properly, the way John would have wanted it. It’s only a pity that Grace and Phoebe are not at home to help her a little more.’
Phoebe had married a banker, with a house in Kensington and two small children of her own.
‘A real, old-fashioned county wedding.’ Clio sighed. She was thinking of Stretton, en fête, and the little grey church on the estate filled with flowers and local people and the great families, and the old house decorated and filled with music and dancing to celebrate the marriage of the Earl. She was surprised by how much the idea moved her. It would be an affirmation that not quite everything had changed; it would be England both at its grandest and its simplest.
‘I’m very happy for them. I shall dance at their wedding, for one. Well done, Hugo and Miss Lucy Frobisher.’
‘Quite right, Clio,’ Nathaniel agreed.
‘It is very Culmington,’ Jake said.
Twenty-two
Miss Lucy Frobisher became the Countess of Leominster at a little after four o’clock in the afternoon of March 24th, 1939.
Exactly as Clio had imagined it would be, the church on the Stretton estate was filled with family and staff and tenants and neighbours, and hotly scented with the blooms of white carnations and lilies. There was a great garland of apple blossom wreathed over the communion rail and when they stood up for the last hymn, with a flutter of hats and skirts and service sheets, Clio could just catch the faint, wet-morning scent of that too, and underlying it all the bitter-wood breath of huge trails of plaited ivy.
In the pew in front of her Eleanor and Blanche were standing side by side, with their profiles matching beneath their hats as if the image of one was reflected from the other. And amongst all the flower scents there was still the faintest trace of their mingled perfumes, white lilac and stephanotis, reminding Clio suddenly of her childhood and the mothers gliding along some seaside promenade in their tight-waisted Edwardian gowns. She thought of Hugo as he had been in those days, amiable and conventional, forever pretending to be aloof from the games that Jake led and she and Julius and Grace unquestioningly followed.
The hymn ended, and they knelt for the Bishop’s blessing. In her unpractised way, Clio tried to offer up a prayer for Hugo’s happiness with his Lucy. It seemed that in the vanishing wake of his youth Hugo deserved some kind of plain fulfilment.
The wedding ceremony had been a simple one, by Hugo’s choice, even though it was conducted by the Bishop assisted by three other clergy, including the rector of Lucy’s home parish. At its conclusion the bride and groom and their parents and attendants moved away into the vestry for the signing of the register. Clio sat in her place with her hands folded in her lap, looking up into the crimson and magenta lights of the east window. The organist was playing a Bach toccata. It was a fine organ for a small church, installed by Hugo’s grandfather eighty years before. The soaring music made Clio think of Julius, and wish that he had come to see Hugo married.
Clio glanced sidelong, over the top of Romy’s new velvet beret, to Grace. Grace was gazing straight ahead of her, apparently absorbed in her own thoughts, her chin held level above the ivory lace and tucks of her Vionnet jabot blouse. Grace did not seem to age as the rest of them were doing. Clio did not think that their own profiles would match any longer, as they once had done to confuse poor Peter Dennis and to entice Pilgrim.
There was a tumbling fanfare of organ chords and the bride emerged on her new husband’s arm. Lucy’s veil had been turned back over the frosty glimmer of the Stretton tiara. Her prettiness was of the regular-featured and unremarkable English variety, set off by a pair of large, pale blue eyes. Clio guessed, from the slightly dazed quality of their smiles as they turned to face the inquisition of the crowded rows of pews, that Hugo and Lucy must be genuinely happy with one another. She had no insight into the workings of Hugo’s mind, but she had never seen him look like this. It was as if he had just been given a surprising and wonderful present, but could not quite believe that it might not be just as summarily taken away from him.
The newlyweds walked slowly down the aisle together. Hugo leant heavily with his free arm on his perpetual stick. He could not move more than a few steps without it, and the twisted stump of his leg gave him almost continual pain. There would be no part in the war for Hugo, Clio thought, if it did come again.
When it came again, as it now seemed that it must.
She turned sideways again, looking back on the congregation, afraid for all of these men with their wedding smiles worn over constricting shirt collars. A cold spasm of fear for Rafael took hold of her and obliterated everything else. Her hands tightened into fists, crumpling the service sheet, and Romy peered up into her face. Clio forced herself to smile her reassurance.
Behind Hugo and Lucy came Thomas, his brother’s best man, with Lucy’s sister Venetia on his arm. He was splendid in the dress blues of the Household Brigade. Thomas was only thirty-four, and a professional soldier. The war would come for him, even if it was no more than a staff war fought from some headquarters well back behind the lines. He winked at Romy as they passed and Clio wished that she could step out of her place and hug him for it.
Venetia was the chief of the bride’s eight attendants. All the bridesmaids wore pale yellow silk with looped panniers of darker gold over their full skirts and crowns of orange blossom in their hair. Cressida was amongst them, thin and solemn-faced, with only the ghost of the plump child she had once been hovering behind her.
Romy rotated her head to watch their stately procession. The youngest bridesmaid was Phoebe’s three-year-old, who marched sturdily beside her cousin Cressida with her miniature orange blossom wreath tipped over her forehead. Romy would have loved to wear a crown of flowers and her own billowing and rustling yellow silk, but she had not been invited to join the company. To Blanche, of course, jus
t as she had once been to Eleanor, Romy was a source of embarrassment. She was to be spoken of in whispers if at all, as the living proof of Clio’s unfortunate circumstances.
There was the matter of her name. Even though Clio now called herself Clio Hirsh again, she insisted on describing her daughter as Romy Wolf. No one had said as much, but there was the question – how would the discrepancy be explained for the newspaper reports of the wedding? How, even, was the matter to be discussed with Major and Mrs Frobisher?
It had been simpler to ignore it, and Romy herself, and to trust to Clio’s discretion.
Clio had been discreet, because she understood her aunt and something of her aunt’s world, but she was disappointed for Romy. The little girl would have to catch what glimpses she could of the great ball this evening from an upstairs landing, in Nanny’s company, but Clio had insisted that she be allowed to put on her best dress and come to the church with everyone else.
Nathaniel gave his arm to Blanche, and they turned to follow the last pair of bridesmaids. Blanche was smiling, happier than she had looked since John’s death, at this culmination of her months of planning and weeks of work, and five strenuous days of pre-wedding celebrations. There was still tonight, the Stretton Ball and the climax of the entire grand scheme, but Hugo was safely married now. He had his Lucy, as John had found Blanche herself more than forty years ago, and there would be a new generation of young Strettons to come.
Blanche swept forward with her hand resting on Nathaniel’s sleeve, and behind her came Eleanor and Jake and the rest of the families, Clio and Grace side by side, the brothers and sisters and cousins and children. They were all there, all of them except for Alice and Julius. They formed up behind the Earl and his new Countess, two by two, and they processed down the aisle between the tall urns of bridal-white flowers and the benevolent smiles of their invited guests.
It was all done as it should be done, Clio understood. Every detail was in place. Her mother and her aunt, Hugo and even Grace herself had been born with innate capacity to manage such things. Clio’s own fearful conviction that the world was on the edge of some great change, and that these stately rituals of the Church and the county and of the social hierarchy of England itself might not be enacted for very much longer, made this marriage and its significance seem all the more poignant.
