by Rosie Thomas
Jake said a little too loudly, ‘I wondered if you’d come with me? I can’t demonstrate spiral bandaging to a church hall full of WVS and firemen. You’ll do it much better.’
She hesitated, and in the light from the side window he saw a heavy-bodied woman with dark hair and a faint trace of the same darkness showing on her upper lip. He saw the white skin of her bare solid arms and the features that had moulded his children’s. This was what he had, this and their mutual resilience.
‘Won’t you come and help me?’
‘I could do. If you like,’ Ruth said at last.
They went out into the sun-warmed evening. The street was loud with playing children, and a small group of them scattered away from the railings in front of the Hirshes’ house. There were the chalk marks of some game on the pavement, and a gaggle of bigger boys running for a ball in the road. In a few more days, perhaps a week, the street would be quiet and almost deserted; most of these city children would be evacuated to safety in the country.
The hall was only two hundred yards away and Jake could see a trickle of men and women making their way towards it. They were all preparing themselves, in their undramatic way, for what would have to be done. He was suddenly vividly conscious of Ruth walking beside him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she answered him.
Jake put his arm awkwardly around her shoulders. Her hip fitted against his, and Ruth lengthened her stride to match his step.
In the doorway of the hall, they looked in at the small audience waiting on their wooden chairs.
‘Here’s Dr Hirsh now,’ somebody called. Jake was a familiar figure in the neighbourhood.
Jake said quickly to Ruth, ‘I have to go to Oxford tomorrow, I promised my father I’d visit him. Won’t you come up with me?’
There was a sense for all of them that the visits had best be made sooner rather than later, because nobody knew what might happen after tomorrow.
Ruth shook her head but she smiled, without resentment. ‘You go to see your parents. I’ll stay here with Luke and Rachel. Just give them all my love, won’t you?’
‘I’ll do that.’ He touched her hand, and then released it again. ‘Now, shall we go forth and bandage?’
‘How did they seem?’ Clio asked Jake.
He lifted his glass of whisky to her, and then drank. The two of them were alone, in Clio’s front room with its view of the dusty square. Romy was asleep upstairs, and Cressida had gone to the cinema with the daughter of a neighbour.
‘Well enough.’
Eleanor and Nathaniel no longer filled the big old house, and there were fewer students and disciples to visit them now, but it seemed to Jake that the old people had drawn into a corner of their domain and found their peace in one another. The losses that they had suffered had in the end brought them closer together and heightened their love and need for each other. Nathaniel’s eyes followed Eleanor to the door whenever she left the room, and his face brightened when she came back again. In her turn Eleanor looked to him for confirmation of whatever she said, even the simplest observation.
Jake was touched by the sight of them.
‘They have become very frail, just lately,’ Clio said.
‘They are getting old. And they have suffered enough.’
Clio stood up quickly, moving awkwardly so that her chair rocked and almost overbalanced. ‘More Scotch?’
Jake held out his glass. Clio had grown very thin, and her eyes slid away from his when he tried to look into her face. When she leant over with the whisky bottle he caught her hand and held it. After a second she tried to extricate herself, but he held tighter. He reached up and put one of his arms around her shoulder, and pulled her down against him. He felt her body resist the warmth of his but then, slowly, it slackened until he all but carried the slight weight of her. He moved sideways in his chair to make room for her to sit with his arm still wrapped around her. She was so close that he could feel the rise and fall of her breathing against his chest.
The weight and shape of her was like Grace, the girl she had once been in a water-meadow on a thundery summer afternoon. Jake had never forgotten.
‘Talk to me,’ Clio begged him. Her voice was muffled.
Jake began to talk. They were strongly in his mind, so he talked about their parents. He retold the old stories about their meeting and courtship, and they both remembered how Nathaniel had been delighted to tell them and how Eleanor would murmur, ‘Nathaniel, really, don’t give away all that old nonsense.’ He talked about their childhoods and growing up in the shabby old house, the five of them strung between the strong poles of their parents.
‘Do you remember the plays? The Sleeping Beauty?’
‘Oh yes, I remember that.’
When she was twelve, Clio had written a play based on the old fairy tale. The script had been full of family jokes and outrageous puns and there had been a role for each of them, even for Alice who was only a baby in arms. Alice had been dressed up in her best lace robe to play the part of the princess at her ill-fated christening.
‘Pappy as the prince, in pantomime tights and a blond wig made from teased-out parcel string? And Julius and me as the fairies in ballet skirts? We must have spent a month making costumes and rehearsing.’
‘Tabby was the grown-up Beauty, do you remember? Very solemn, with the spinning wheel we borrowed from somebody’s mother. Mama was the Queen and I was the King in a horsehair moustache.’
The play had been performed amongst the shrubs and creepers at the wild end of the garden on Midsummer’s Eve, to an audience of neighbours and schoolfriends.
‘Those were good days. Living in the Woodstock Road was like having a common identity, even though we were all so different. It was comfortable and safe, and at the same time interesting and challenging. We had to match and meet the rest of the family. To measure up to what Pappy and Mama expected.’
Clio nodded her head, like Romy listening to a story. ‘Yes, that was what it was like.’
Jake drank some more whisky. He would have to go back to London this evening, but not just yet. He was close to Clio, hooking the net of the shared memories around them. They were separately disabled by their grief, but they should try to hold on to each other more tightly now that Julius and Grace were gone. Now that the circle was broken.
‘They were happy, Eleanor and Nathaniel, weren’t they?’ Jake asked.
‘Yes, always.’
‘There are happy marriages, then.’ He was not quite sure whether he had said it, or just formed the words within himself, but Clio startled him by sitting upright.
‘Yours is happy, if you would only see it. If you would only attend to it.’
Her vehemence startled him.
Jake unwillingly considered the broken pattern of his years with Ruth. His unfaithfulness was like an irregularity in the design of their lives. Sometimes the strength of the repeat took over and obliterated it, but at other times it glared out, unmissable and hideous, and destroyed all the neat sequences around it. He swerved away from contemplating the havoc it had caused.
‘A good marriage,’ he mumbled. ‘Our parents’, that is. But look. Look at the outcome. Each one of us children. We are all flawed, aren’t we? Did they weaken us with their strength?
‘There is me, with my failing. You know about that, of course.’
The thought of Lottie came to him, and her tears.
‘And Alice, and poor Julius.’
Clio silently put her hands up, her fingers bent and spread apart to touch her temples. She wanted to close out his voice, but it went on.
‘And Tabby, hiding herself away in her nun’s habit. All of us are flawed. Except for you, Clio. You are whole, and you must be the strength and the success for the rest of us.’
Clio shut her eyes. Within her head she heard the melancholy voice of the sea. She saw the wall of water, and the heavy bolt that held the door shut.
Oh yes, Jake. I am flawed too.
If you knew how deeply the fault runs. Because I am a murderer. And that is what I must live with.
She made herself open her eyes and look again. Jake was turning his empty glass in his fingers, watching her.
‘I will do my best,’ she heard herself say, in a voice that seemed to crack and shiver. ‘Would you like a last drink?’
Jake hesitated and then shook his head.
Clio suddenly said, ‘Go home, Jake. Go home to Ruth while you can and make things right with her. Then you can be the strength and the success yourself, and you won’t have to look to me.’
He held her for a moment longer, and then patted her bone-ridged shoulder with the flat of his hand.
‘Come and see me off?’
‘Of course I will.’
Clio waited on her front step, with her hand lifted in a wave, until Jake had climbed into his car and driven away out of the square.
Then she went back into her house. She picked up the two empty glasses and rinsed them in the sink, dried them and replaced them in the cupboard. When the small job was done she went softly up the stairs to make sure that Romy was sleeping comfortably.
She came down again, and wandered back into her sitting room. She saw the tidy ranks of her books, the picture over the wooden mantel and the rest of her possessions, carefully and neutrally arranged.
Clio picked up a book and sat down with it, but she did not read.
The hot weather held, and under the hard skies the business of each day unfolded with leaden slowness. There was a sense of waiting and watching, of the world holding its breath.
Reservists were being called up in England and in France, and in Germany two hundred thousand men were massed along the Polish frontier. In the East End of London the people were filling sandbags. Clio and Cressida had made blackout covers for all the windows of the house in Paradise Square.
Clio could not sleep. She sat up late, reading or working or staring at the meaningless pages, and she woke at dawn to prowl restlessly through the rooms while Cressida and Romy still slept. So it was that she was awake, standing at her window surveying the square, when Nathaniel came very early one morning at the end of August. Clio watched him as he crossed the scuffed grass. He was hurrying, with his head down, moving too fast for a man of his age and infirmity. His stick prodded impatiently at the ground.
Clio’s body felt heavy with apprehensions as she moved to open the front door. Her fingers were numb and she fumbled with the catch, and she thought again of the bolt that she had never drawn back.
Nathaniel stood on the step. He was gasping for breath, and leaning on his stick for support. He tried to speak, and could not.
Clio held his arm. Her heart began to thump in her chest, a dull rhythm of dread. At last he looked up. She saw that there were tears in the corners of his eyes.
‘Not Jake?’ she whispered. Nathaniel’s head shook as he fought to catch a breath.
‘Not Lucy’s baby?’ There were still four months to go.
No, again.
Clio’s fingers tightened, digging into her father’s arm, like claws. ‘Please tell me. Please.’
He sucked the air into his lungs. He was crying with the effort to speak and with the burden of his message.
His mouth opened. ‘Rafael,’ he sobbed. ‘Rafael is free. He is in Zürich this morning.’
Clio reached out to steady herself. She was blind, and dumb, but the tips of her fingers met the wood of her front door, warm with the heat of so many days, grainy and solid and true. The sun had dispersed the thin morning mist, and the birds were singing.
The train steamed and sighed outside Oxford station. From the height of the carriage window Rafael looked down at the dusty ragwort and nettles and docks that sprawled over the bank beside the track. When he craned forward to look ahead of the idling train he could just see towers and rounded grey domes in the hazy distance. He was weak and exhausted, but impatience with this last slow mile of the journey made him want to jump up and swing down from the carriage step so that he could run along the track to find her.
There had been so much ground, from the camp to Oxford, but somehow he had covered it and now he was almost there.
Rafael had got away from the work camp, but he would never know if he had escaped or if they had allowed him to slip away. If it had been luck, or Grace’s invisible hand working for them at the very end.
He had been among a work party digging the holes for new fencing posts that would enclose a vast new compound. More space was needed to house the thousands of Jews who were being herded into the camp. He had been labouring with three other men, and in one second he had looked up to see that the guards with their rifles were looking in the opposite direction. There was a line of woodland only thirty yards away.
He ran like a hare, and found himself in the shelter of the trees. There was no outcry, and no crack of gunfire.
After that he had walked by night, and hidden himself by day, and he had been helped by a farmer’s wife who fed him and gave him a workman’s clothes. The farmer’s wife had a neighbour who owned a wagon, and at last Rafael had made his way to the Swiss border. In Switzerland there was a Jewish organization that had been formed to help refugees. When he reached them they took him in, and they gave him the passport and papers of a Polish Jew, an engineer who had been shot by the Nazis. They had also given him enough money to reach England.
The last link in the chain was the telephone call from Zürich to Nathaniel in Oxford. Nathaniel had agreed to claim the Polish Jew as a relative, and to offer him a home and a sanctuary in England.
And so almost in the last hours of peace, Rafael reached Dover. He travelled by train to London, and from London to Oxford across the little, domestic, gold and green landscape of England.
He was luckier than Grete and Leopold Wolf, who did not escape. The men had come for them, to the little house against the wall of the forest, and they had been taken away.
Rafael bent forward in his seat, wrapping his thin arms around himself. A soldier in a fore-and-aft cap was sitting opposite, watching him.
‘You all right, cock?’ the soldier asked.
Rafael took a scrap of paper out of the pocket of his shirt and held it out to the man. ‘Do you know this place, please?’
The soldier frowned a little at the sound of his accent. Then he shrugged. ‘Paradise Square? It’s an easy walk from the station. Left over the road, and up to a big crossroads.’
Rafael listened to the man’s instructions, plodding through this last stage of the long journey in his head. He felt as if he had been travelling for half a lifetime.
‘You got that, mate?’
‘Yes. Thank you so much.’
There was a jolt and a hiss of steam, and the train began to edge forward again. Engine sheds and signal boxes slid backwards past Rafael’s staring eyes, and then he saw the chocolate and yellow wooden fretwork of the platform canopy.
Clio watched the black moon of the engine face slowly approaching in its nimbus of smoke. She had met every possible train since Nathaniel had brought her the news, and with each disappointment when Rafael did not appear she remembered how she had waited in vain for him on the terrible morning in Paris. Anxiety made her shiver even in the thundery heat.
With a final jolt the train stopped. There was a fusillade of shots as the doors slammed open along the length of the platform and passengers flooded out. The station was crowded with a swarm of men in uniform with kitbags and women in bright dresses, and because his eyes and ears were still attuned to the grey monotony of the work camp Rafael felt confused and afraid of the noise and colour. He lifted the small bag that the Jewish group in Switzerland had given to him and climbed down, the last to leave the compartment.
From where she stood at the end of the platform, shading her eyes against the sun, Clio saw a tall man with hair as grey as ash and a face like a skull papered with translucent skin. He had changed almost beyond recognition, but she did not mistake him for an inst
ant.
Rafael hesitated while the crowd ebbed around him, and then he looked towards her. She was thinner, and there were lines at the sides of her mouth, but her face was still soft and it burnt with love.
He put down his bag and held open his arms, and she ran to him.
London, 1990
Clio sat in her house in Little Venice, beneath The Janus Face by Quintus Prynne. The portrait was not much admired nowadays although its strident modernism had once been acclaimed, and the artist himself was all but forgotten. He had been an official war artist, and he had been killed by a stray bomb in 1944.
Clio remembered him, and many other things besides. The memories marched past her as she sat in her high-backed chair. Sometimes she could see the faces clearly and at other times they were blurred, receding away from her into the grey distance. Sometimes she couldn’t even see Rafael’s face. Rafael had been her husband for thirty-five happy years, but he had been dead for fifteen and she was tired now, and bored by her own infirmity and the solitude of old age.
Was it today that the girl was coming, with her machine and her questions? What was it the nurse had said?
And then, as if she had conjured them out of the sea of memories, the nurse appeared, and the girl with her. The girl had long hair, and she was wearing it loose over her shoulders today. Clio eyed it with disapproval. She did not consider it a suitable coiffure for a girl who was not really a girl at all, but a woman of almost forty.
The woman sat down opposite her, and the nurse brought them tea on a tray. Clio didn’t want any tea, but she took the cup anyway.
‘You are not too tired, are you?’ Elizabeth asked. The nurse had warned her that her patient was confused and anxious today.
‘I am not tired at all,’ Clio lied.
The girl was Cressida Brock’s daughter, of course. And so she was also Pilgrim’s granddaughter, sitting opposite his masterpiece, which she plainly did not care for at all. The realization made Clio want to laugh.
Clio wondered if they had ever talked about Pilgrim, or if she had only imagined it. Elizabeth’s questions confused her. She could remember the exact configuration of the patterned linoleum in the old schoolroom in the Woodstock Road, but she could not remember if Cressida’s daughter had been here with her questions yesterday, or if it had been last week, or a month ago.
