by Rosie Thomas
Cressida was cruelly fastidious. The thoughts made her want to separate herself from Grace, who stood immobile with her white face half-hidden by a wisp of veil. Even the hat she wore, and the narrow-waisted black suit, seemed both too chic and too self-conscious for this desolate day. Cressida wished that she could cross over the lips of the grave-mouth to Clio and Jake.
The Hirsh children stood in a close group around Eleanor and Nathaniel, but each of them knew now that they could never fill the invisible spaces that separated them. The adored baby and the favourite son, the musician and the peacemaker, could never be replaced.
Eleanor’s hand rested on her husband’s arm, but it was Jake who supported them both. Tabitha found her own comfort in her faith. Her lips moved as she prayed.
Clio was as still as Grace. She held herself carefully, as if she was afraid that if she did not the grief and rage and bitterness would spill out of her. When Nathaniel had mumbled the news, barely intelligibly because his mouth seemed frozen and distorted, she had been ashamed because she had wished so fervently that it might not be Rafael. But then, with frightening speed and strength, anger had descended on her. It burnt in her then, and now, like a malevolent fire.
At first, the anger had been directed at Julius.
How could he leave them all? How could he have chosen to vanish, to step beyond some curtain so suddenly and completely and leave them, leave her, alone?
Until he was dead, Clio had never fully understood that her twin had been half of her. Now she felt as if she was the living trunk of some tree that had been split by lightning. One flank of it had been burnt away, to leave the sad pith exposed. The bare wound ached with an intensity of pain that made her afraid of herself. Perhaps the gash would yellow and harden with time, and at length the moss would grow over it, but the tree would never flourish again.
The anger shook her, like a gale. He had gone, and left her, without a word or a warning.
Then, just like the wind veering, the focus of her anger had shifted. Julius had lived on the margins of his own life, because of Grace. Clio had seen him waiting, they had all seen him waiting like some patient monk, at first with a young man’s confidence and then, as the years passed, with the beginnings of resignation.
Then there was Berlin. As soon as Julius had achieved happiness it had been taken away again, and Grace had done that. It was because of Grace that Julius was dead. First Alice, and now Julius. He had gone away, and Clio was left with only her anti-twin.
Clio’s anger shifted and then steadied, with Grace at its centre.
Clio watched her across the banked-up earth and the mockery of flowers. Julius lay between them under a mask of polished oak. The wind brought the first spots of rain driving into their faces, and the droplets scattered like blemishes over the coffin lid.
After the burial service the mourners drew together outside the churchyard gate. There was no arrangement, as there had been after Alice’s funeral, to meet at the house in the Woodstock Road. Eleanor and Nathaniel had not found the strength for it. The few of Julius’s friends, mostly musicians, who had heard about his death in time to attend his funeral, moved awkwardly amongst his family and murmured their condolences. The rain grew heavier, and the cars began to move slowly away.
Cressida came to Clio through the helpless group that was left. She held out her hands, not knowing what to ask for. Clio put her arm around her shoulders and held her, rocking her a little, as she might have done with Romy.
‘I feel so sad,’ Cressida whispered.
‘I know.’
It was a measure of how very young Cressida was that she should be surprised by grief. Or perhaps, Clio thought, it was an indication of her own weariness that it should seem now to be inevitable. She had learnt about grief, but not enough about anger.
Clio looked across Cressida’s shoulder. A thick strand of the girl’s hair had escaped from beneath the brim of her hat, and Clio coiled it around her finger and then tucked it back into place, again as if she were her own daughter.
Grace was watching them. She saw Cressida with Clio, as she had never been with Grace herself. Or had not been since she had grown old enough to turn away, after Anthony’s death.
Clio slowly raised her eyes. Between the dark overcoats and bowed heads she caught Grace’s look of pure, clear enmity.
Jake said that one of the family must travel up to Wales again, to sort and pack Julius’s possessions and to close up the cottage.
‘I would go,’ he told Clio. ‘But there is work. And Ruth and I …’
He shrugged. Jake had been with Lottie Brand when Nathaniel telephoned with the news about Julius. Ruth had tried to find him, but he was not where he had claimed to be going, nor had he ever been expected. At first, in the shock and confusion, her discovery of his lie had seemed hardly to matter. There had been no recrimination; not even a comment. But in the days afterwards Ruth had retreated even more bleakly within herself. Jake realized that they had hardly communicated for almost as long as he could remember, but their existence now was in silent and rigid parallel. Jake could not move to one side or the other, either to Lottie or to his wife and children. The spectacle of his own weakness repelled him.
‘I understand,’ Clio said.
‘Perhaps Tabby would come with you?’
There was no question that Nathaniel or Eleanor could undertake the journey. The three of them murmured about their parents now as if they were invalids.
‘I don’t mind going alone,’ Clio said.
Julius’s death had touched Tabby no less significantly than the rest of them. She had announced, in her calm way, that she was making preparations to enter an Anglican convent. It was an open order, she assured them.
‘If Mama and Pappy will have Romy for a day or two.’
‘It would help them, I think.’ Jake said with relief.
Clio was afraid of the cottage on the sea-marshes, but she made the necessary preparations to travel to Wales. Julius’s car was still parked in the rough barn beside the Welsh house. Clio could pack it with his belongings, and drive it home again. She did not imagine that it would be a very big load.
Romy went willingly to her grandparents’. When it was time to leave her, Clio was swept with such a wave of possessive love that she did not think she would be able to relinquish her. She knelt down and hugged her and pressed her face against the thick mat of fair curls.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ she promised. ‘Be a good girl for Grandma.’
Nathaniel came with her to the gate. He shuffled now, like an arthritic. Clio looked up at the old house, and the turret with the witch’s hat. She left it with a heavy heart.
The rain fell all through the long journey northwards. Clio changed at Chester, and a slow train took her onwards through small seaside towns she had barely heard of. Between low sand dunes crested with coarse grass she caught the occasional glimpses of a vicious-looking sea.
At length, feeling stiff and dirty, she left the train at Llandudno Junction. There was a single dilapidated taxi waiting in the station yard.
Clio gave the driver Jake’s directions to the cottage. The man’s Welsh accent was so thick she could barely understand his response.
It was not a very long drive. They passed through a straggling village and then out, on the seaward side, into a wide, flat landscape of low mud-banks and salt creeks. Ahead of them Clio could just discern the sea-wall, a heavier grey line under the lowering sky. The only living creatures she could see were slow flocks of sheep, huddled in a mass against the wind, and the gulls circling above them.
There was a low farm building to one side of the road, but the taxi passed by. It must be where the farmer lived, the neighbour who had come to look for Julius. A few hundred yards further on the road stopped at a five-barred gate. A rutted track led beyond it, and then Clio saw the cottage. It was tiny, and the same grey as the rest of the landscape. A single chimney stuck up from the crooked slate roof.
The drive
r obligingly took her beyond the gate, over the potholed track to the front of the house. There was no enclosure of any kind. The short marsh-grass ran all the way up to the stone walls.
When Clio stepped out of the car the force of the wind almost overbalanced her. It was searingly cold, and the rain drove into her eyes as if to blind her. She tasted the rankness of salt on her lips.
‘Holiday, is it?’ the taxi-man asked, showing his teeth with a smile.
‘Not a holiday, no.’
Clio paid him, and watched the ancient car bumping away down the track. She felt that her last link with the warm world was being severed. She made herself turn to the cottage door. It had once been painted brown, but the paint had blistered and flaked away in the wind to reveal the split and swollen wood beneath.
There was no key. Jake had told her that. The old lock had had to be broken.
She lifted the latch and the door swung open. She closed it behind her and at once the wind’s howl dropped to a low whistle. A massive wooden sliding bolt would secure the door from the inside.
There was one room, with a stone hearth and an old bread-oven to one side of it. There were wood ashes still in the hearth and an armchair drawn up close to it. Julius’s violin was no longer there. Jake had brought that home with him.
There was very little other furniture: a table and two stick-back chairs, a Welsh dresser, and an old upright piano. Sheets of music were neatly stacked on it, some of them manuscript scribbled with angry thickets of notes.
Clio walked very slowly around the small space. With the tips of her fingers she touched the few plates propped on the dresser, and she lifted the lid of the piano and played a single chord. The notes shivered in the close air. Then she looked into the tiny kitchen with the stone-shelved pantry leading off it. The tap was dripping in the sink, over a sea-green stain, and she twisted it tighter.
The precipitously steep staircase was revealed behind a door to the side of the hearth. It was narrow and there was a dogleg bend. How had they brought Julius down here, at the end? The pity for him swelled inside her like a wave.
There was only one bedroom, with a kind of cubby-hole beyond it. A window in the gable end, blurred with the rain, looked directly out over the sea. White-capped waves were whipping towards the sea-wall. Clio sat down on the brass-framed bed, feeling the horsehair mattress barely yield beneath her weight. Blankets were neatly folded at the end of it. There was a pine chest of drawers under one window and a three-legged stool that she thought might once have been used for milking. There was an oil lamp on the chest and a box of safety matches beside it. Clio lifted off the glass mantle and held a match to the trimmed wick. The light flared up, blue and then yellow. She replaced the mantle and held up the lamp. Her shadow reared on the wall beside her.
Deliberately, she looked up at the blackened beam that ran the length of the cottage. There was a hook, sturdy enough. She had expected to be disturbed by the sight of it, but she was not.
Clio was no longer afraid of the marsh cottage.
When she watched the taxi driving away she had wondered how Julius could have come all the way here, to this bleak and remote landscape of all places, but now she began to understand. He had come here exactly in order to remove himself from the world.
She did not know what he had found here, or what demons he had finally confronted, or run away from. But he had chosen to make this journey to the sea and then the final climb up the steep stairs.
The thought of his solitude and the struggle towards death freshened her grief until she had to double over, her knees drawn up to her face, with the springs of the old bed creaking beneath her. She wept, as she had not been able to do before, turning her face into the crook of her arm and giving herself up to her loss.
After a long time, she lifted her swollen face. The meagre light outside had entirely faded and the windows had shrunk to black squares.
Clio listened.
The cottage was full of Julius’s presence. She felt close to him now. In his last letter to Jake he had said that this place soothed him. She hoped that much was true, and that he might have found some solace in contemplating the flat land and wide, empty sky. He had also said that he could hear music. She thought that she too could hear it now. It was slow and profoundly solemn.
Some of her sorrow had shifted. Clio was relieved that she had come here and found that there were no terrors within the thick stone walls. This place had held the last of Julius, and she loved it for him.
She had not taken the trouble to bring any food with her, and she was not hungry now. She climbed down the stairs again and took a cup off a hook on the dresser. She ran the cold tap in the kitchen and drank some of the pure, cold water. Then she went back up to the bedroom. Without undressing she wrapped herself in the blankets and lay down to sleep.
At home in Vincent Street, Cressida wandered downstairs from her bedroom to the drawing room, and from the drawing room to her mother’s study. Grace’s part-time secretary had been in that morning and she had opened and sorted the post. The letters lay in tidy piles now, waiting for Grace’s attention when she came in. Cressida thought of making one large and vicious movement, whirling all the letters into the air so that they rose up and settled like litter on the rug. She did not do it. Instead she ran her finger over the telephone receiver resting in its cradle, over the onyx pen-and-ink stand that had been presented by Grace’s constituency party, and touched the silver frame containing Anthony’s photograph.
She opened her mother’s morocco-bound engagements diary and read what was written there. Grace would be home soon.
Cressida was supposed to have been attending a luncheon party, given by the mother of one of her fellow débutantes to enable a selected handful of the girls coming out that year to meet one another. There was one gathering or another almost every day in the weeks leading up to the start of the Season.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Cressida had told Grace.
‘Don’t be silly. One has to go to these things. It’s how you make friends. Everyone does their Season.’
‘Everyone?’
‘Everyone like us.’
Cressida waited until Grace went out, and then she telephoned the hostess and explained that she would not be able to come to lunch today because she had a headache.
She went back up to the drawing room now. After standing at the window looking down into the street for a moment she sat down on a sofa and began to read a magazine until she heard Grace’s taxi drawing up at the street door.
Grace was tired. The morning’s committee had been no more than usually tedious, but the simple effort of putting her key in the lock and pushing open the door seemed almost more than she could manage. She walked stiffly into the house and along the hallway to her study. There were piles of letters and memos waiting for her attention, even though she had already dealt with a sheaf of them at the House.
Grace sat down at her desk and rested her head in her hands.
When Julius died, she felt as if the last safeguard had been removed.
Ever since her childhood, for as long as she could remember, there had always been Julius. She knew that he would understand and he would forgive her. Whatever she did and whatever steel or daring or ruthlessness it required of her, she found it and she was capable of it because at the very end, and at the bottom of whatever she reached, Julius would not condemn her.
She had never even properly known it until he was no longer there, and that was as sad as anything she could imagine.
Now that he was dead she felt stripped; exposed and vulnerable as she had never felt before.
She could not have married him, before Alice died. That closeness of the bone was between them, personified in Clio, and it had separated them as well as uniting them. Nor, after Alice died, could she have gone on living with him and physically loving him. That part of her had withered away. She had tried to be honest, believing that it was better to tell him the truth than to pretend. But she h
ad never ceased to depend on him, an airy dependence that might have seemed remote but was in truth as vital as a miner’s pit-props. All unknown to her while he was alive, Julius had been the touchstone by which she lived her life.
Now he was dead, and the loss of him had made her weak.
Grace lifted her head from her hands and she saw Cressida waiting in the study doorway.
‘Cressida? I thought you were having lunch with Sarah Stuart-Key?’
‘I didn’t go,’ Cressida said deliberately.
She came further into the room. Watching her, Grace could clearly see the plump, withdrawn child who had faded into this thin, spiky adult. She was shaken by a clumsy pulse of love for both of them, past and present Cressida, love that seemed all the more thick and weighty because it was inarticulate.
‘I want to talk to you,’ Cressida said.
Grace slowly put aside her sheaf of papers. To Cressida, she seemed to make the gesture with reluctance. It was like an emblem of all the years in which her mother had been too busy to mother her. It made her feel hot behind her eyes, and it knotted up the careful words she had planned and made her deliver them like a blow.
‘I know about my father. I found out the truth.’
Grace was caught, half turned in her chair. ‘What do you know?’
Cressida leant over her shoulder and snatched up the framed photograph of Anthony. She held it against her chest with her arms crossed over it.
‘I know he isn’t my real father, even though I loved him. Pilgrim is, isn’t he?’
‘Pilgrim?’
Grace was numb with fear and shock. It was unthinkable that the secret should swim up now, out of the depths she had consigned it to. She could only repeat Pilgrim’s name, like a fool, like a criminal.
Grace’s reaction would have told Cressida everything, even if she had not known it already. She had never seen any emotion reflected so clearly in her mother’s face as she saw this flash of guilty fear.
Cressida felt her world shifting on its axis. Giddily, she confronted the new perspectives that were revealed. Her mother was vulnerable. She wielded new power herself; she was no longer a child, even to Grace, who had always made her feel younger and more inadequate than she truly was.
