by Rosie Thomas
The sun in the west struck through the windows and illuminated the portrait. Clio stared up at the webs of colour that Pilgrim had woven into their streaming hair, and at the ramparts of solid flesh that forever strained to break apart from each other. It was a good picture, she thought. It revealed the truth, and the truth was not pretty.
Pilgrim had always said that it was his masterpiece.
Romy came to look for her. She held a pack of Happy Families cards. ‘Mummy, will you play?’
‘Of course I will. But we need another person.’
‘Cressida likes this game.’
‘I know she does, but Cressy isn’t here.’
‘Grandpappy, then.’
‘Let’s go and find him, shall we?’
They settled down together to Mr Bun the Baker and his friends. Nathaniel won, and he took just as much pleasure in his triumph as Romy would have done if it had been hers. Watching them, Clio thought how close together youth and old age were. It was she who was isolated, in her middle years.
At six o’clock Nathaniel turned on the radio for the news. They listened to the description of German arms and soldiers pouring into the Baltic port of Danzig.
‘We shall be at war soon,’ Nathaniel said. ‘There’s no hope now.’
Romy spread out the cards on the green baize table-top and then gathered them together in her small hands.
‘I think we should move back to Paradise Square,’ Clio told him. ‘Romy and I shouldn’t trespass on Mama and you for ever.’
‘You can if you wish.’
She smiled at him. ‘I know that. But I’d like to go back to my own house before … anything else happens.’ She would not say before the war comes, although they both knew that it could not be very many days off.
The little house had been kept well aired. Tabby came in sometimes to look after it, in her novice’s dress with the ivory crucifix lying snug against a starched bib. Tabby was calm and sure now. She had found her own place, and her family could only try to accept what they could not hope to understand.
Clio and Romy moved back home again at the beginning of August. Clio found that someone had placed Julius’s Mozart in a niche at the angle of the stairs. She supposed that it was Nathaniel.
The Morris Eight had been recovered when the floodwaters receded, but all of Julius’s books and papers and music had been destroyed. The marble bust alone had survived, and Clio was pleased to find it in her house. She was satisfied to be home again. She believed that she could go on living here, because she must, with her black twin. It would be a quiet and uneventful life, lived for Romy’s sake.
The Gilman painting of the bedsitting room hung in the small front room, and the Omega Workshops plate was propped on a shelf beneath it. Her possessions were a small comfort, even though they seemed to have survived from another existence that she could barely recall.
A few days after they had re-established themselves, Tony Hardy came to visit Clio. He brought an advance copy of Berlin Diary. She took it and turned it over, looking at the dust jacket printed with her name, and the restrained typography, and the tidy pages with their paragraphs and punctuation.
She had no sense that the book was anything to do with her at all.
‘I’m glad you are better,’ Tony said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you pleased with the look of it?’ He nodded eagerly at her novel.
‘It’s very handsome.’
‘We shall do pretty well with it, I think. The timing of it, the latest news from Europe, everything is in our favour.’
Even the war, Clio thought. Rafael.
But after Grace drowned she had stopped hoping and praying for Rafael. That faint, fading chance of happiness was forfeit now.
‘That’s good.’ Clio said politely. Perhaps the book would earn her some royalties. She had very little money and even a tiny extra income would make a difference.
Clio gave her publisher tea, and listened to him talking about literary London as if he was giving her the latest news from Brazil or Borneo. After he had gone she put the novel on a shelf. It looked no more and no less significant than the other books ranged beside it. The part of her life it dealt with was behind her. What she did now was to exist quietly and colourlessly from day to day, and her black twin always kept step with her.
It was a hot, dry August. Clio sat out in her tiny back garden, watching Romy playing in her cotton sunhat. She wished that she could make plants flourish the way Eleanor did. However carefully she dug them in and watered them, Clio’s seedlings wilted and died.
The days passed slowly in the haze of the heat. Oxford was almost deserted. On August 20 Clio read The Times’s report of the German–Soviet agreement, and knew that the last frail thread of hope for peace had been broken.
A letter came from Cressida.
Hugo Leominster was Cressida’s legal guardian. After her mother’s death she had gone to live with her grandmother and Hugo and Lucy at Stretton; no one had tried to suggest that she should complete her Season.
Blanche was slowly retreating into old age. She was forgetful, and had begun to confuse Cressida with Grace. A dower house was being prepared for her on the estate, to which she would retire with her faithful lady’s maid and a handful of staff to care for her. Lucy Leominster was expecting a baby at Christmas. The newlyweds were utterly absorbed in one another, and Cressida was lonely and at a loss in the huge, solemn house.
Her letter said, ‘Dearest Clio, may I come to stay with you and Romy? Now that you are better again? Not to live with you if you don’t want that but for a visit? I would like it so much. Hugo and Lucy are very kind, but it is not like being with you. Can you understand?’
Watching her mother’s expression, Romy said sharply, ‘What’s that?’
‘A letter from Cressy.’
‘Is Cressy coming?’ The child’s face relaxed and brightened with anticipation.
‘I don’t know,’ Clio whispered.
Grace had thought that Clio was trying to steal her daughter away from her.
Was that true, Clio wondered now? Had that been a part of everything else that Grace and she had done to one another?
Perhaps the intention had been in her heart, and she had never known it.
She remembered the races over the Norfolk sand in pursuit of the boys. Grace and she were always running as fast as they could with their sharp elbows out, both of them ready to dig at the other if they could.
That was how it had been, for all of their lives. Yet she had never properly understood the depth of it, the truth that the flaw ran fatally through the rock of both of them. Grace had loved the rock crystals and mineral specimens in the Pitt-Rivers long ago, Clio remembered.
The stone had split apart along its fault line when she stood in the upstairs window and watched the water coming. She had thought then, This is one race that Grace cannot win.
It had only been a brief hesitation, an infinity of power and retaliation hotly flowering in those short seconds, but that was what had been in her head. However much she might repent or wish them away, the words and the hesitation were burnt into her heart.
‘Mummy, you crumpled it.’ Romy pointed to the letter.
‘How silly.’
Clio smoothed it out and read it again. Her choice was to deny Cressida because she could not bear to live with this daily reminder of what she had done to her, or to take her in and learn to accept. Clio bowed her head. Her dark doppelgänger was here in the house already. There was nothing to deny.
‘Shall we ask Cressy to come and stay with us?’
‘Yes,’ Romy crowed in delight.
That evening, from the Woodstock Road, Clio telephoned Stretton.
Cressida came three days later, and Clio went with Romy to meet her at Oxford station. When she stepped down from the carriage Clio thought, How like her mother she looks now.
Romy had drawn and painted a Welcome Cressy sign, and they had pinned it up in the Par
adise Square hallway. Cressida stopped when she saw it, only half smiling, and then turned to put her arms around both of them.
‘I’m so glad to be here,’ she whispered.
Clio felt the warmth of her cheek against her own, and she made herself look down the vista ahead of them both.
‘I’m glad you came,’ she answered.
Cressida unpacked her things and put them away in the little third bedroom. When Romy had gone to sleep that night, the two women sat at the table in the kitchen. Clio had her mending basket and her head was bent over the heel of one of Romy’s socks. Cressida had picked up the pincushion, and now she arranged the pins into a tight circle.
Musingly, almost as if she were talking to herself, Cressida said, ‘I miss her all the time. I look round, or listen for her. Footsteps, coming and going, doors opening or a car arriving. She was always so bloody brisk. Busy and intent. I had never considered that she might die. She seemed too powerful to be threatened by death. I used to have a fear for my father, long before he was ever ill, but never for Grace.’
Anthony was ‘my father’ again, Clio noticed. She was glad of that.
‘All my life I felt that I was trying to move out of the shadow of Grace’s influence, and now that she is gone there is a great space that can’t be filled.’ Cressida shook her head wonderingly. ‘She was very strong, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes, she was strong.’
‘You must miss her too. As much as I do.’ Cressida was trying to see Clio’s face, but she was intent on her darning. ‘But you felt about her the same way, didn’t you?’
Clio never raised her eyes. She went on setting stitch after stitch, drawing the worn threads together.
‘She thought that I was trying to take you away. Trying to alienate you from her. She told me so, at Julius’s cottage.’
‘You couldn’t have done that. But I know what she was like. I want you to understand that I do know, Clio.’
The darn was almost complete. It was nearly time to lay the table for their supper. The pleasure at having Cressida to share the meal with her lifted, and then dipped with its counterweight of memory.
‘I miss her,’ Cressida whispered again.
Grace’s shadow fell between them. She had always been so strong, she had seemed invincible.
‘Yes,’ Clio said. This was how it would be.
In the basement kitchen of her Islington house Ruth stood up and turned off the radio. The news made her feel angry with the politicians who had conciliated, and hesitated, and allowed the Nazis to trample as much of Europe as they had done. But it also made her feel heavy with dread. She had wished for resistance, and now that it was coming she was afraid of it.
She went to the sink and filled a saucepan with cold water, then lifted it on to the stove and lit the gas. Luke was reading at his friend’s house and would be coming home soon. It was time to call Rachel down from her bedroom to help with the evening meal.
The front door opened overhead. The footsteps were too heavy and brisk to be Luke’s. It must be Jake, home from his evening surgery. Ruth wiped her wet fingers on her apron, feeling the roll of flesh that girdled her middle as she did so. It surprised her, as it sometimes did. She had been intent on other things and for a moment she had forgotten her weight, and her uncomfortable age, and even the constant reality that Jake had deceived her for the sake of his own pleasure.
Jake came down the stairs. He saw his wife, caught in her apron beside the sink with her hand raised to pat her hair into place. The intention was for him, he knew that. The realization touched him but at the same time he thought of Lottie, as he did still, in every hour of the day. The physical pain caused by her absence made him move across the kitchen stiffly, like a much older man.
When Ruth had found him out he had deliberated, pretending to himself that he had some choice to make about the direction of his life, all through a long and agonizing week.
In the end he had given way to his own certainty that he could not leave his wife and children, even for Lottie.
He sat on the bed in her small room, with his head hanging and his clenched fists pressed between his knees, like a condemned man.
He confessed to her that he had weighed their future against his family’s and that the two of them had lost. He had told her that he would not see her again. The taste of the words in his mouth made him afraid that he would vomit.
Lottie had been indignant, and then when she saw that he meant what he said she was violently angry, and finally she cried. Her tears were terrible because he had never seen her cry before.
He had pulled himself out of her arms, disentangling her fingers from his clothes, and walked out of the room. He had walked without knowing where he was going, and he had been sick in the gutter of the Clerkenwell Road. He made himself sit down and drink a whisky in a pub, and then he went home to Ruth.
‘It’s over,’ he told his wife.
Ruth never said anything. She looked at him, and he saw the patina of familiarity accumulated in all their years together, and a new expression that was made up of weariness and mistrust and aversion.
It came as a shock to Jake to realize that Ruth might dislike him.
‘I’m sorry I have hurt you,’ he said. ‘It is all over now. I won’t see her again.’
Still Ruth said nothing. She had moved away from him, and he had been struck by the vulnerability of her body for all its seemingly armoured bulk.
They had lived with each other since as if an awkward truce had been called.
‘You’re early,’ Ruth said now.
Jake smiled at her, rubbing his beard with his fingertips. ‘Small surgery, thank God. Where are the children?’
‘Luke is at Benjamin’s, and Rachel is upstairs. Shall I call her?’
‘In a minute,’ Jake said. Without knowing what his intention was he put his arm around Ruth’s waist. At once the memory of Lottie’s narrow and supple body came back to him, as clearly and as powerfully as if he had only relinquished it an hour ago. He pinched the memory down, grinding it away under the thumb of his determination, and kissed Ruth’s cheek. Her skin was still smooth and soft, and he saw the old way the colour flushed under it.
‘Bless you,’ Jake said simply.
Her head rested against him for an instant.
‘I must get the potatoes on,’ Ruth said. Rachel came down and kissed her father. She did her chores, humming as she set out the knives and forks, and then Luke appeared with his armful of books. The children talked and argued a little as they all moved around each other in the confined space, and Jake looked past them to where Ruth stood at the stove. She worked energetically, as she always did, giving her full attention to the task in front of her.
Jake sat down at the head of the table, and the rest of them arranged themselves in their usual places. It was a family evening exactly like a thousand others and he felt the resonance of it, the texture of familiarity woven from years of small compromises and unspectacular achievements.
This was what he had, Jake thought.
He felt a small rekindling of self-respect for having tried to preserve it. He did not think he had done so out of cowardice, although he could not be certain of that.
‘Did you hear the news?’ Luke was asking.
Jake nodded. Chamberlain had announced the Treaty of Alliance with Poland.
‘What will happen?’
Jake was already working with the ARP, and as soon as he had eaten he would be on his way to the church hall at the end of street to deliver the first in a series of demonstrations of first aid and bandaging. Bandaging had never been one of his particular strengths, he recalled, even when he was a student. Ruth was much better at it. Perhaps he should encourage her to come with him.
Luke and Rachel were looking at him, waiting.
‘We’ll have to stand up and fight. There’s nothing else, now. And we shall win in the end.’
He felt different from the prickly, idealistic boy who had watched th
e outbreak of war with such despair and revulsion. He remembered the field hospital, and the sights and smells of it still came back to him in his dreams, but he would not be a conscientious objector in this war against Hitler. His illusions and principles had been eroded by age and experience – or perhaps, he thought, he no longer felt able to pride himself on the strength of his conscience. The corners of his mouth curled with a thin, self-critical amusement.
There was a poem he recalled reading long ago, in France. He had forgotten most of it, but one couplet came back to him.
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
He might even have quoted it in one of his letters to Grace. Amidst the destruction he had imagined himself ruined, but he had later understood that he was not.
He had survived and he would survive because he was resilient.
It was not a quality that he was proud of; it seemed unambitious and pedestrian and cautious, yet he knew that he possessed it. The poem should have been Julius’s, but Jake did not know if his brother had ever read Donne.
The children were still watching him, waiting.
‘We’ll each of us do what we have to,’ Jake said calmly. ‘That is what will happen.’
Luke blinked. His eyesight had always been weak, and now he wore dark-rimmed glasses that made him look older than his age. ‘I shall join up.’
Ruth snapped, ‘You are not even seventeen years old yet. You will sit your exams and get your university place, that’s what you will do.’
‘I’ll join the FANYs,’ Rachel chipped in. Under her mother’s stare she added, ‘When I am old enough, of course.’
‘Mr Arkwright says it will be a long war and I agree with him. There’s plenty of time,’ Luke said.
‘We shall do what we have to,’ Jake repeated. His eyes met Ruth’s, and for once she did not look away.
When they had eaten, Luke and Rachel cleared the table and began the washing up. Jake packed a first-aid kit for his lecture and waited by the front door until Ruth came up the stairs from the basement. She liked to sit in their overgrown garden at the end of the day’s work and smoke a single cigarette.
