‘Your father and I would have liked to give you a party at home,’ Eleanor sighed, not for the first time. ‘A real party for all our friends, like in the old days.’
Clio watched her fussing around the bedroom, in which all traces of Miles’s occupancy had been carefully hidden. Her mother was already dressed for the evening. The old-fashioned and favourite dress she had chosen was cut to show off her bosom and hide her thickened waist, and the dark red shot silk flattered her colouring. Eleanor made no concession to the modern fashion for women to look as much like boys as possible. Her long, thick hair was still piled on top of her head and her heavy figure was tightly corseted. She looked handsome but distinctly of another era, like some ornate mahogany sideboard placed four-square in a mirrored Deco salon.
The thought stirred a protective tenderness in Clio. She knew how much Eleanor wanted to be maternally involved in her first daughter’s marriage preparations, and the sighing and fussing were only expressions of her frustration because Clio could find nothing for her to do.
The wedding itself was to be small and quiet, in St Pancras registry office, with a lunch in the Eiffel Tower afterwards. Ruth and Jake were giving the party this evening, and in her capable way Ruth had refused all offers of help. Clio understood that tonight her mother would like to be arranging her hair and making last-minute needle-and-thread adjustments to some frivolous frock for her, but she could not offer her even that much. Her hair was cut in a short bob, because Miles liked it that way, and could be brushed into waves in ten seconds, and her simple blue dress was already ironed and waiting on its hanger on the back of the wardrobe door. And she was afraid that Eleanor’s fiddling would at any minute expose some evidence of Miles that she could not explain away.
‘Why don’t you go into the other room and ask Pappy to pour you a drink, to calm you down before we go to Jake’s?’
Her mother turned on her, the magnificently prominent bosom heaving. ‘I am calm. Why should I not be? I was only saying I wish you had let us give a party for you at home. You only marry once, Clio. There are so many people in Oxford, in your own world, who have known you since you were tiny …’
Piano teachers, Clio thought, and French mistresses, and one-time undergraduates who were slowly metamorphosing into portly dons. She felt no particular nostalgia for the rotation of the academic year in the Woodstock Road.
‘This is our world, mine and Miles’s,’ she said, as gently as she could. ‘And everyone in the world I care most about will be at Jake and Ruth’s this evening, except for Julius.’
Julius was in Berlin. Clio said hastily before Eleanor could begin to bewail his long absence, ‘This is what Miles and I both wanted. And it’s not as if I’m the only daughter. Tabby and Alice will probably both demand huge weddings in the same year and Pappy will be driven to the verge of bankruptcy to provide them with orange blossom and white tulle, and you will both be thanking your stars that I chose St Pancras and a tailored costume from Selfridges.’
Eleanor sighed yet again. ‘Tabby is more interested in teaching her Sunday-school classes than in meeting a suitable young man. I have tried to encourage her since she came out, believe me, but she’s not like Phoebe. I suppose Phoebe might be accused of over-enthusiasm in the other direction, but then I suppose most of the young behave like that nowadays. And Alice … who can possibly predict what Alice will want when the time comes?’
Alice was stubborn and moody, given to unpredictable enthusiasms and sometimes seemingly at the mercy of her own unfocused intelligence, but when she wanted to be she could also be funny and charming and affectionate. She was her father’s delight, as she had been ever since babyhood.
While they were talking Clio had put on the blue dress and fastened it without more than a glance in the wardrobe mirror. Now she went to Eleanor and put her hands on her shoulders. She bent slightly and kissed her mother on the forehead, where two vertical lines showed between her eyebrows.
‘Everything will be all right,’ she promised her.
She guided Eleanor out of the bedroom with relief. If any rumpled male vest or stray cut-throat razor should happen to present itself in one of the other rooms, she could dismiss it as left behind by Julius.
Nathaniel was sitting beside the gas fire, reading the current issue of Fathom and smoking his pipe. He had lit and relit it with matches from a box belonging to Miles, absently picked up from the table beside him. As soon as Eleanor and Clio came in he laid the quarterly aside, with a touch of regret, and stood up.
‘How beautiful you both look. I shall be able to claim the two belles of the ball as my own.’
‘It isn’t a ball, Pappy. What can you be expecting, in Jake and Ruth’s little house? It’s a small party, for family and a few friends. Nothing formal or elaborate.’
Eleanor rustled to his side. ‘Do you see what I mean? No music or dancing. No flowers, not even a corsage for her dress, and the plainest dress for a bride-to-be, as if she wants to disappear into the wallpaper instead of shining as it is her right to do. And it’s not as if it were a question of money although she keeps talking about how poor she and Miles will be, because I have told her we could quite well afford …’
Nathaniel put his hand on her arm. ‘Eleanor, this is Clio’s wedding, and she must have it as she wants. If she wanted massed bands and twenty attendants, she would have said as much. If she prefers beer and a chicken sandwich in Islington, then she has my blessing also.’ His eyes were crinkling over the grey and black wool of his beard.
‘I don’t think it will be quite as grim even as you paint it,’ Clio told him before she kissed him. Although in her heart she felt a shiver of doubt as to whether the party was such a festive idea as it had seemed, a month ago, when Miles had agreed to set a day for their wedding. She saw her mother and father glance at each other, and then the loving determination of their smiles.
There was an extravagant bottle of champagne keeping cool on the sill outside the kitchen window. Clio had intended to bring it in with a flourish and drink a toast to Eleanor and Nathaniel and to her own future, but the moment suddenly seemed too brittle with their separate anxieties. The champagne had better stay where it was while they attended soberly to whatever the evening required of them.
Perhaps Eleanor was right after all, she thought sadly. Perhaps there should be music and flowers, and a dress that would swirl in the scented air as she danced with her lover.
But Clio only said, ‘If we are all ready, perhaps we should drive over to Islington now in case Ruth does need any help at the last minute?’
Her little car was parked in the nearby mews. As Nathaniel squeezed into the back seat and Eleanor settled alongside her, Clio was thinking that the Austin was becoming a luxury that she and Miles could no longer properly afford. Since Miles had stopped doing hack work in order to concentrate on his book, they had had to make a series of economies so as to be able to exist on Clio’s money alone. She had a small income from her Holborough grandparents, as well as what she earned at Fathom, enough for one person to live modestly on but hardly enough for two. She had made the necessary sacrifices joyfully, for Miles’s sake, and for the great novel.
But her car gave her a sense of independence, and she still loved the mechanical business of driving it. Perhaps they could manage as they were for a few more months, she decided. Until Miles’s book was completed. Or perhaps she should look for another part-time job, one that would pay, instead of giving her time voluntarily to the Mothers’ Clinic. She would have to talk it over with Jake and Ruth. She had hardly seen them, except at the Clinic, since Miles had moved in, whereas the three of them had once been almost inseparable.
The weight of her anxieties seemed to depress the bones of her skull, but when she tried to single them out and confront them they shifted and slid, leaving only the sickly reminder of their pressure. I am getting married, she told herself. We shall be poor for a time, but this is what we have chosen.
The car bumped gently over the cobbles in the mews, and then turned out into Gower Street.
Ruth was in the kitchen with an apron tied over her best dress. She pulled out a drawer and gathered a handful of silver forks, then laid them in a rattling sheaf on the tray to be carried upstairs. She could hear Tabby with Dorcas in the dining room overhead. Perhaps between them they would be able to make a half-decent job of laying the buffet. Dorcas was willing enough but she was only the daily cleaner and couldn’t be expected to have much idea about waiting at table, and Jake’s sister was a good-natured girl who couldn’t keep an idea in her head for five minutes at a time. Ruth assumed that she would have to go up in the end and redo everything, but before then there was still the best cutlery to be sorted and the cream to be piped on to the sherry trifles.
She wiped her fingers on her apron and turned to the table where the dishes were waiting. They were heavy; Jake would have to carry them upstairs.
Where was Jake? He was late back from surgery, and he had promised faithfully that he would be home in time to help her.
Tabby put her head round the door at the top of the narrow stairs that led down to the kitchen and shouted, ‘Do you want us to use the big white tablecloth?’
Ruth winced. Tabitha had been staying in the house for two days and she still hadn’t understood that once the children were in bed the house must be kept quiet until they were properly asleep. Now Lucas would probably be out of bed and running up and down the stairs, and Rachel would start calling for another drink.
She went to the foot of the stairs. ‘Of course I do, that’s why I put it out. Don’t shout, Tabby, please.’
The forcing bag was in the drawer of the table. Ruth found a metal nozzle and fitted it in place, and spooned whipped cream into the mouth of the bag. The basement kitchen was dark, lit only by an overhead bulb, and she stood in her own light and frowned at the bland yellow faces of the trifles. The custard looked rubbery and was shrinking away from the sides of the bowls, but she could pipe the cream to disguise that. The cream came out of the nozzle a fat corrugated worm, following the impatient movement of her fist.
The front door opened and Jake’s medical bag thumped on the hall floor. Ruth heard him greeting Tabby and Dorcas, and then coming down to the kitchen. His bulk in the doorway seemed to darken the room further.
‘Big surgery?’ Ruth asked, not looking up from her piping.
‘Interminable. Winter’s coming.’ He came to the table, prodding a finger into a dish of potato salad and then putting his arms round her from behind. He kissed the back of her neck under the coil of dark hair. The weight of him pressed her up against the table edge and he slid his hand down over her hip.
‘Jake.’ Ruth moved to one side and went on working. He surveyed the laden table good-humouredly.
‘It looks good, all of it.’ Jake had a hearty appetite. ‘The fish especially.’
He had been down to Billingsgate Market to buy the pair of fat sea bass. Ruth had poached them in a borrowed fish kettle and now they lay nose to tail on a big oval platter, an astrological sign in hammered silver decorated with cucumber rings. The fish had been expensive, but in a private conversation Nathaniel had assured Jake that he would pay.
‘It’s what fathers do,’ he had said jovially. ‘Foot the bills.’ He was pleased that Clio was marrying at last, and believed that she was old enough to make her own decisions. Miles Lennox did not seem particularly hardy, but Clio had strength enough for the two of them.
Jake was wondering how he would feel when the time came for him to give Rachel to another man. He did not want to imagine her wriggling eel’s body transformed into a woman’s.
‘Are you going to stand there all evening, or might you go upstairs to change and then come and help me?’ Ruth asked.
‘Five minutes,’ Jake told her. He went upstairs whistling.
Don’t wake the children, Ruth wanted to scream after him.
At last the puddings were finished and the table was ready, laid out to Ruth’s satisfaction. She was still in her apron, directing Dorcas and Tabby to move chairs against the wall when Clio arrived with the senior Hirshes. The small rooms seemed full as soon as they crowded in.
Jake accepted the praise for the buffet as if he had done all the work himself. But Clio took Ruth to one side, undoing the strings and pulling off her apron for her. ‘There,’ she smiled. She brushed the loose strands of hair from Ruth’s damp cheeks. ‘Thank you for everything.’
Ruth’s shoulders lost a little of their stiffness. ‘Well. I hope you’ll be happy. I wish you every happiness.’
‘Thank you,’ Clio said again. They kissed, and over her sister-in-law’s head Clio saw Miles arriving with Max Erdmann. Miles was wearing his good tweed jacket and a presentable shirt, even a proper tie. He was early, as he promised he would be, and he was rather pale but obviously sober. Clio’s face brightened and the sharper lines dissolved as she looked at him. She felt some of her anxiety lifting. The party would be a success, why should it not be?
They met in the middle of the room and embraced each other, to the satisfaction of all the onlookers.
‘Are you all right?’ Clio murmured. She could see the pale fuzz of hair on the rim of his ear, and a shaving nick under his cheekbone. She tried not to think of putting her mouth against it.
Miles studied her in return. She wanted to put her hands up to her hair, to pinch colour into her own cheeks to bloom for him.
‘A little tired of hiding out in Max’s sordid den.’
Max had offered to put Miles up while Nathaniel and Eleanor were staying in Gower Street.
‘Only a few more nights,’ Clio consoled him. She drew his arm around her waist and turned to face the room.
Ruth’s parents were arriving with her unmarried sister, and some writer friends of Miles followed behind them. Clio saw the Fitzroy regulars glance curiously at the table with its cargo of sea bass and fish balls, potato salads and heavy cream puddings, before herding into a corner with Max.
The doorbell rang continuously. Colleagues from the Mothers’ Clinic came in bearing wrapped presents under their arms, making Clio think hilariously of the brown paper bags of contraceptive supplies. More Fathom regulars appeared, apparently the closest family Miles could claim. He seemed to have no relatives of his own, but there were more than enough Hirshes and Shermans to make up for that. The noise level rose and Jake and Nathaniel pushed through the crowd, filling glasses and exhorting everyone to eat and drink and enjoy themselves.
The silver fish were already shredded and there were craters dug in the bowls of salad when Grace arrived, an hour after everyone else.
She stood poised in the doorway, looking in at the red-faced guests on their upright chairs with mounded plates and napkins spread on their knees. Clio knew that she was seeing Nathaniel and Jake holding their bottles aloft, and Ruth with her hands full of dirty cutlery, and wire-haired Dorcas shrinking behind the table as if she would be happier hiding beneath it. Miles lounged with one shoulder against the wall and a cigarette in his mouth, squinting through a plume of smoke at Clio’s grand relations.
Thomas was with Grace. He came in resplendent in his cavalry officer’s uniform, his head seemingly almost touching the ceiling, and behind him were Phoebe and Cressida and Alice.
Because she had begged and pleaded to be allowed to, Alice was staying with the Brocks instead of being billeted on Jake and Ruth. She hovered on the dividing line now, not sure whether to rush across and put her arms around Nathaniel or to linger in Grace’s scented orbit. Cressida hung back even further behind, peering around Phoebe, curious to see this first adult party but embarrassed by her own lavender ribbons and buttoned patent-leather shoes.
Grace sailed across the room. She was wearing ivory silk and her ropes of pearls and all the men in the room turned to look at her. She held two hands out to Clio. ‘I’m so sorry we’re all so late for your party. Will you forgive, darling?’
‘Where is Anthony?’ Nathaniel boomed.
Grace turned to him, smiling, with Thomas and Phoebe beside her like a pair of lieutenants.
She’s so secure, Clio thought. So certain of everything.
‘Uncle Nathaniel, Aunt Eleanor, darling, how marvellous you look. Don’t stand up. Anthony is partly the reason why we’re late. He’s not very well, the poor boy. He wanted so much to come, but I wouldn’t let him. He sends all his love, and apologizes, and wishes us all a wonderful time.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Clio asked. Her voice showed her concern.
‘Oh, just a feverish cold, I think. But I sent him to bed.’
Grace was a little piqued. Tom and Cim Mosley had been coming for drinks and she had had to cancel them, and then she had had to drive all the way out to nowhere on her own, with a carload of babies, to come to this impossible party. It was not Anthony’s fault that he was ill, of course. It was simply that she did not much enjoy even their own circle without him beside her.
Clio said, ‘What a shame. But I’m glad you could come. Miles, here’s Grace.’
With a round of introductions and greetings, the ripples that the new arrivals had made spread outwards to the walls and became part of the choppy waters of the party. Alice rushed to tell Eleanor and Nathaniel the latest elegant details of life in South Audley Street, and Clio took Cressida by the hand and led her to the buffet. Ruth continued to clear plates with her lips slightly pursed.
Grace was able to look quickly around her and establish that Pilgrim was not there. Relief lightened her mood at once. Jake made his way through the crowd. He put his heavy hands on her shoulders and looked down at her. With his height and girth he was an imposing figure, but Grace could no longer see the handsome boy in him. It was Julius who seemed always unchanged.
‘Anthony is all right, is he?’
‘I think so, doctor, thank you. He’s been overworking, rather. He gave a big speech last week on national relief schemes. He’s made an impression from the back benches already, you know.’
‘I’m sure he has. Look after him.’
‘Jakie, who are all these people?’
Jake laughed. ‘Family, and medical and literary folk, of course. Who would you like to meet?’
‘Are there any of Anthony’s constituents?’
‘I doubt it very much.’
‘Wait, then. Which are Mr Lennox’s family?’
‘Oh, I think he sprang into the world unaided.’
‘And remained unclaimed thereafter?’
‘So it seems. Until now, that is. Now he has all of us.’
They were quiet for a moment before Grace asked, ‘Do you like him?’
Jake considered. ‘I don’t dislike him. Our interests don’t coincide, but I can hardly blame him for that. I believe he’s good for Clio. Her face shines when she looks at him.’
Jake knew that look. It was the dazed impatience of sexual obsession, and he envied her. Miles was less easy to read, but then Jake did not consider it necessary to analyse his sister’s fiancé. Clio was grown-up enough to judge for herself. He simply wished the best of luck to both of them.
‘Really?’ Grace murmured. Privately she thought that Clio seemed nervous in a way that could not be explained just by the imminence of her marriage.
Cressida was sitting on the other side of the room, doggedly eating trifle. Grace thought back to her own wedding, and her anxiety to become Mrs Brock as quickly as possible while all the time lamenting the loss of her precious Bohemian freedom. What would that freedom have amounted to, she wondered now? The chance to drink in pubs and go to bed with characters like Miles Lennox’s friends?
A wash of love for Anthony poured through her. Lucky, she thought. So lucky.
Would Clio be as fortunate? It was just possible that she was pregnant, but somehow Grace did not think so.
‘Why don’t you talk to Miles yourself?’ Jake was saying.
‘I will.’
The room was overheated and the noise level rose steadily. Ruth’s own efforts and her chivvying of Dorcas seemed to have no effect on the rising tide of dirty plates and filled ashtrays and clouded glasses. Grace picked her way through the detritus to the corner where Miles and his friends were talking. They were beginning to be tired of drinking without a congenial bar to lean on, and were wondering how soon they might slip away. Miles stood up when he saw Grace coming and cut off the rest of the group with a hitch of his shoulder.
‘Lady Grace.’
‘Anthony is very sorry not to be here. He wanted to wish you both well. Clio’s a great favourite of his.’
‘Is she?’
The sneer in his voice was unmistakable. Miles picked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. Grace determined that he would not rebuff her.
‘How is your novel?’
‘Quite well, thank you.’
The careless insolence almost took her breath away. She thought, There is so much hate in him. Which of us does he hate, and why? Is it all women, or only women like me?
Clio can’t be going to marry this man …
He was waiting, one eyebrow lifted, for her to say something else. But in the middle of the room Nathaniel had risen to his feet.
‘Friends, family,’ Nathaniel called. He spread his hands, enjoining them all to make a circle around him. Miles strolled away from Grace with his hands in his pockets and took his place at Clio’s side.
Nathaniel made a graceful little speech. He welcomed Miles and wished the engaged couple every happiness, and paid a generous tribute to Ruth for her food and hospitality. He thanked all the guests for coming, and the natural warmth and affection that radiated from him made them feel that they had indeed been part of a convivial and successful evening.
Nathaniel raised his glass. ‘Miles and Clio,’ he proposed.
‘Miles and Clio,’ they answered, and drank from the glasses that Ruth had not managed to clear away. Clio blushed, and Miles turned his head and touched his lips to her face.
Grace watched, feeling cold in the hot room.
An over-enthusiastic nurse from the clinic began to sing, ‘For they are jolly good fellows’, and a thin chorus of voices joined in. When the cheering was over Grace looked away in relief, and found Cressida beside her.
‘I think we should go home to see how Daddy is,’ Cressida said.
‘I think we should too,’ Grace agreed. ‘Let me first have a quick talk to Clio.’
Clio had left the room. She had seen Ruth shouldering her way downstairs with a tray of leftovers.
Grace found them in the basement kitchen. They were standing side by side at the sink, and Clio’s arm was around Ruth’s shoulders.
‘It’s your wedding. I don’t want you to help,’ Ruth was insisting. She looked as if she might be about to cry. They both turned to stare at Grace.
‘Lovely party, Ruth,’ Grace said.
Ruth picked up the empty tray and pushed past Grace. They heard her feet clumping up the stairs behind them.
Clio turned her back again. She slowly rolled up her sleeves and plunged her arms into the sink.
Grace was suddenly exasperated by the smell of fish, the harsh shadows thrown by the single lightbulb under its glass coolie shade, and the grease-filmed water that left a scaly tidemark around Clio’s elbows.
She asked, ‘Clio, are you really going to marry that little queer?’
Clio stood very still. Then she raised her head. Above her, through the dark window, she could just see the basement area and the railings above. Feet and legs shuffled beyond the railings. Some people were leaving, and she had not said goodbye to them.
Almost absently, she said, ‘Miles isn’t a queer. And even if he were, I would still be in love with him.’
Grace opened her beaded bag with a snap. She took out a cigarette and clicked her lighter, then inhaled sharply. ‘Clio.’
Clio spun round. Water splashed on the bodice of her dress. She had to make an effort not to shout. ‘Go home, will you, please, Grace? You don’t belong here. We don’t want you here.’
They confronted each other. Grace wanted to go back, to begin again, softly this time, but Clio gave her no chance. Her eyes were like stones. It was Grace who looked away first.
She shrugged, waving her cigarette in its own smoke, then butting it out amongst the dirty dishes on the table.
‘You know where I am if you need me,’ she said. As she climbed the stairs she was surprised to find that her legs were shaking.
The door to Anthony’s dressing room stood ajar and the light was on. Grace let her fur wrap drop over the back of a chair and stooped briefly to glance at her face and her hair in the triple mirror. The cut-glass bottles and silver accessories on her dressing table caught the light and glittered back at her. It was reassuring to come home.
She crossed quickly to the dressing room. The door leading to Anthony’s bedroom was also open, and she could see the shaded lamp burning beside his bed. He must be still awake, waiting for her to come in.
‘Darling, I’m back at last,’ she called. She would sit beside him and talk for a few minutes, and forget the evening.
She reached the bedside before she saw for sure that he was asleep. He was lying on his back with his mouth open, one arm crooked over his eyes. His skin was flushed and damp, and his cheek when she put her hand to it was burning hot. As soon as she touched him he flung out his arm, muttered something, and rolled away as if her touch had hurt him. Grace saw that there was a darker patch on the pillow where his head had rested. A single wheezing snore escaped from deep in his chest.
She hesitated, and then told herself that sleep was the best thing for him. She drew the covers up around his shoulders and turned off the bedside lamp, then tiptoed back to her own bedroom.
‘It’s seven-forty-five, Lady Grace.’
The housemaid brought in Grace’s tea early the next morning, as she had been instructed to do. Grace had a nine o’clock fitting, followed by a charity committee meeting. As soon as the maid had put the tray down Grace got up and pulled on her silk robe. She went through to Anthony’s bedroom and found him still asleep. Only she saw that he must have been up in the night, because some books and papers had been moved off his table and the little shaded lamp had been knocked over. She set it upright again, frowning.
She watched him for a moment and saw that at least he seemed to breathe more easily. If he was not much better by the afternoon, she decided, she would call in Dr Boothe.
Grace gave instructions that Mr Brock’s tray was to be taken up at nine-thirty, if he did not ring for it before, and left the house.
Cressida stood in the drawing-room window, looking into the street. She held a fold of the dove-grey curtain in her fingers, pleating and repleating it into a series of concertina creases that would have earned a sharp rebuke from Grace if she had been there to see. But in her anxiety Cressida did not even think of that.
Please come, she breathed.
At last, at midday, a taxi drew up. Grace stepped out with a milliner’s box and some other packages. Cressida ran.
She reached the foot of the stairs as the front door opened. ‘Mummy, where’ve you been? You’ve got to ring the doctor. Daddy looks strange. Nanny says the doctor should see him.’
Standing with her arms full of parcels Grace stared at Cressida. Her daughter’s round black eyes were accusing. The sight of her was an irritation until the words sank in.
‘What is all this, Cressida? Where’s Nanny?’
There was the sound of running feet and Cressida’s nanny appeared at the head of the stairs.
‘It’s Mr Brock, my lady. His temperature is very high. I think the doctor …’
‘Mummy, oh quickly, Mummy …’ There was panicky fear in Cressida’s voice.
‘Calm down, Nanny, for goodness sake.’ Grace dropped her packages and hurried to the stairs. Cressida wriggled in front of her and would have darted up ahead but Grace seized her arm. ‘Go downstairs and sit with Cook, please, Cressida.’
For a moment it seemed that the child might refuse to do as she was told, but then she bent her head and melted away. Grace followed the nanny, keeping her eyes on the white starched triangle of her headdress as it receded ahead of her.
Anthony was lying on his side with his eyes open. Grace stooped beside him. His face looked congested and he was breathing noisily through his mouth. At first he stared without seeming to see her, but then he licked his cracked lips and muttered, ‘Hello, old thing. We must look at the portfolio.’
Grace stood up. Anxiety tightened in her throat. ‘Stay here with him, Nanny. I’ll go and telephone.’
Cressida hovered as silent as a shadow in the passage outside the drawing room. She heard her mother talking to the doctor’s receptionist in a high, tight voice.
‘… I don’t care who he is seeing. This is an emergency, do you understand? Put me through to him at once.’
Usually her mother’s imperious ways made Cressida shrink with embarrassment, but now she dipped her head in two sharp nods of encouragement. The palms of her hands felt cold and clammy spread against the beige-painted dado of the corridor wall. Grace talked briskly to the doctor. Cressida shrank out of sight again when her mother came out of the drawing room, then listened to the door of her father’s room opening and closing, and the low murmur of voices.
Cressida closed her eyes and resigned herself to waiting. The house felt quite different from normal. It was unnaturally still and the air seemed heavy, she had felt it as soon as she woke up. Before she had even looked into her father’s room. She tried a prayer but could only manage Please God, please God, over and over.
The doctor came quite quickly. He was a pink man in a pinstriped suit with a watch-chain. Grace had been sitting in a chair beside Anthony’s bed, holding one of his hands between both of hers, but she jumped up as soon as he was shown in.
‘Dr Boothe …’
‘If I might just look at the patient first, Lady Grace.’
She felt herself dismissed. She wrapped her arms around herself and stood at the window, willing herself to be calm as the doctor made his examination. Anthony was quiet at first, but then he began to talk in a low, hoarse voice about stocks and dividends. He wanted to get up and sort out some papers. That was what he must have been trying to do in the night, Grace realized.
‘That’s right, old chap, but not to worry about that now,’ the doctor soothed him. ‘The thing is to get over this little bout before you do anything else.’
The doctor’s face was sombre when he finally motioned Grace to one side. ‘Do you have someone you can send out to have this prescription made up?’
‘Of course.’
Anthony’s man was dispatched and the nanny was recalled to watch by the bed. The doctor washed his hands, rinsed and dried them with meticulous care.
‘Please tell me what it is, Dr Boothe.’ Grace was even meek in her fear now.
The doctor led her into the next room. Grace allowed herself to be stationed on her own day-bed to receive the news. ‘I believe he has a form of influenza. That in itself would not be threatening to a healthy man of his age, but there is now a secondary, pulmonary infection. An infection of the lung, that is. His temperature is high, there is some delirium, and some cardiac irregularity. How long has he been unwell, Lady Grace?’
‘A day. No, two days. He, we thought it was a feverish cold.’
‘I understand. Is he worried, in any way out of the normal?’
‘He gave a major speech to the House, just last week. His father’s business, he is a stockbroker, and there was the Hatry crash last month, of course. I believe there were … clients who suffered losses. I don’t think it damaged Anthony personally, financially, that is.’
‘I see. It doesn’t help that he has political or business anxieties, naturally.’
‘What will happen?’
‘I can’t say, yet.’
Grace stared at him. His pink face seemed to hang in front of her like some jack-o’-lantern.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The infection must run its course. But it is a virulent one, threatening, to have taken hold so quickly. The question is if his system can hold up against it.’
Grace did not move. If, he had said, if. An hour, two hours ago she had been concerned about the fit of a winter costume. Now this man was saying there was a chance that Anthony might die. She knew he was saying that, although the words were fuzzy, the darkness of them inadequately bleached by euphemism.
Sudden fear drained the blood and heat out of her, and she felt that she could not raise her arm, or move her fingers, to save Anthony or herself. She sat on the day-bed looking towards the dressing-room door. She could see his face, distorted with the pain of drawing breath, as if the walls were glass. The life they had constructed together had seemed invincible, like a stone tower, and now the difference of a few hours threatened to bring it down.
‘If you had called me in earlier …’
‘He was asleep when I came in last night, and this morning. He was feverish, but I saw no reason to call.’
‘I see, of course …’
Grace realized that the doctor was watching her. He was judging her, and her capacity to deal with the crisis. Her back stiffened at once. She could move her fingers, all of her body now. She would not let Anthony die.
‘Anthony is very strong, very determined. He will recover.’
‘There is a good chance.’ The doctor was relieved. They would work as a team, at least.
‘What must be done for him? Will you remove him to hospital?’
‘I would not like to take the risk of moving him now. He will need professional nursing: I can arrange that for you. He must be given the medication I have prescribed; we will do what we can to bring his temperature down.’
‘Thank you,’ Grace said. She stood up, wanting to get away from the man’s amorphous predictions, back to Anthony.
He was lying as they had left him, his eyes half closed. Occasionally his lips moved, forming words they could not hear. Cressida’s nanny looked frightened.
Dr Boothe said, ‘The nurses will do everything that needs to be done for him, Lady Grace. It would be better for you to have some company. Your mother, or a sister, perhaps?’
Grace was thinking of the tower of her marriage, square blocks of stone years, defying its shaky foundation. The ground beneath it had begun to ripple as if in an earthquake, mocking the jaunty little structure. She didn’t want anyone here now.
‘Perhaps,’ Grace said.
‘I will be back at five,’ the doctor told her.
Cressida drew back into the shadows at the end of the corridor as he passed by. She waited with her anxiety for Grace to come out and tell her what the doctor had said, but Grace did not emerge.
The house became possessed by a kind of grim bustle. From her vantage point next to the drawing-room curtains Cressida saw two nurses arriving. They had white caps tied with strings under their chins, and dark capes that made her think of the folded wings of birds of prey. Footsteps passed up and down the stairs, and voices murmured urgently.
After the nurses came a van, and two men with a railway porter’s upright trolley. The trolley was painted cream with big chips knocked out of the paint to show the bare metal ribs beneath. There was a tall grey cylinder mounted on it, with a sinister apparatus of silver taps and black rubbery tubes on the top. The men dragged the trolley and its cargo backwards into the house, and Cressida heard it bumping up the stairs.
The telephone began to ring. Someone answered it, not Grace, and almost at once it rang again. There was the sound of opening and closing doors, but beneath it all there was the same ominous silence of the day that crept into Cressida’s head and hammered with the dull pulse of her blood.
She waited, willing Grace to come and find her, until she could bear it no longer. She slipped up the stairs and saw one of the nurses hurrying with a covered bowl. The door to her father’s room opened and closed again, shutting her out. She tiptoed to the door and pressed her ear against it. The door was heavy and she could hear nothing.
If he … he mustn’t. She could not bear that. But they must not keep her here on the outside any longer. She should be with him too, as well as Grace.
Cressida lifted her chin. She was about to give a timid knock, but then changed her mind. She twisted the handle and the door swung open.
She saw the bed and the high white pillows. The porter’s trolley had been wheeled up close to the bed and the rubber tubes snaked over the covers. There was a black mask covering her father’s face. One of the nurses held it there.
Cressida ran forward, with some thought of snatching it away.
‘Cressida.’
Grace jumped up from the chair beside the bed. The nurse lifted the mask and Cressida saw her father’s face. He was white, and his lips were blue. His eyelashes seemed very dark. He opened his eyes and looked at her.
Grace caught her, pulled her back from the bed. ‘What are you doing in here? Where’s Nanny?’
The arm round Cressida’s shoulder seemed a restraint, not offering any comfort. She said in a slow voice, ‘I want to see Daddy. I need to. Daddy, I …’
The other nurse, the one without the suffocation mask, came to her other side. ‘Not now, dear. Best not now. Come and see your daddy tomorrow.’
They were dragging her away, Grace and the nurse between them. They were almost at the door when she heard it. Anthony said distinctly, ‘Cressida.’
‘I’m here,’ she shouted, twisting and trying to duck out of their hands. She could hear him gasping and then the mask descended again. She was out in the corridor once more, with Grace. The door closed on them. Cressida saw that her mother did not look like herself. Her face seemed to have been peeled and left raw. It frightened Cressida to realize that for once Grace did not have the time or the strength to be angry with her.
‘I want you to stay with Nanny. Just stay downstairs with Nanny and Cook.’
Cressida found the courage to confront her. ‘Is Daddy going to die?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Why are they putting that thing on his face?’
‘It’s an oxygen mask. They are giving him oxygen to help him to breathe.’
Nanny appeared on the landing. ‘There you are. Where have you been? I’ve searched everywhere. Your tea is ready, Cressida. Come on with me, now, there’s a good girl.’ Nanny didn’t scold, either.
Cressida thought of refusing, of making some effort to cling on to the door handle, so that they would have to prise away her fingers one by one. But then if she went and ate her tea and seemed to be good and normal as on any other day, then everything might somehow become normal again, and the ordinary, dull, blessed routines of everyday would descend. Cressida bent her head. ‘I’m coming,’ she said.
She allowed Nanny to lead her away. Grace went back into the bedroom and Cressida plodded downstairs. She sat at the kitchen table and ate a boiled egg and bread and butter. After the bread and butter Cook gave her some iced biscuits, as if in some way she deserved a special treat. Cressida ate them in silence, staring at the black-leaded range and the line of polished pans suspended above it.
‘All right, ducky?’ Cook asked, exchanging glances with Nanny over her head.
‘Yes.’ Cressida contained her anxiety with weary economy.
‘That’s a good girl,’ Nanny said.
A tray was laid for Grace, linen cloth and napkin, china and silver and tiny morsels of food, but it was sent back almost untouched. The doctor came back again, and this time he stayed. The telephone rang and was answered. More food was prepared, and sent up for the bird-of-prey nurses.
Cressida’s neck and shoulders began to ache with the effort of sitting still, listening to muffled sounds and trying to decipher them. There was no sign of ordinariness descending again. She felt rather than saw the semaphoring of the servants above her head.
‘I want to see Daddy,’ Cressida said, when Nanny told her that it was bedtime. ‘Just to kiss him goodnight.’
‘No,’ they answered, ‘you can’t see him tonight, dear. Perhaps in the morning.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘We’ll see. Time for bed now, Cressida.’
She went, and lay in her bedroom with the night-light burning. Grace did not come. The same disturbed silence weighted the house, a heavy and monotonous silence only broken on its surface by hurrying feet and opening doors. Once, before she fell asleep, Cressida heard Jake’s booming voice, cut short as yet another door closed. She dreamed of her father’s blue-lipped face and the black mask, grown huge and soft and shapeless, descending on it.
Anthony lay in the ramparts of pillows. His mother and father came, tiptoeing beside the bed, but he did not know them. He did not know Jake either when Jake bent his dark head over him. His eyes were turned inwards, beneath closed lids, to a restless landscape of burning rocks and seething water pictured in the hot coals banked around his heart.
Grace sat in the chair next to the bed, listening to the battles he fought for his breath. Sometimes the forces were regrouped and the attack remounted, and it seemed that they might win. She leant forward in her seat to look at his face, willing her own strength into him. But each time the attacks were beaten back and dispersed, and the gasps grew shallower, and wider spaced.
For the last hour each breath that he took was a shudder, a sigh of pain. At the end Grace was praying that it would finish. Jake’s face was a black mask.
Anthony died at twenty to four in the morning.
It was October 28, 1929, the day before Wall Street crashed.
‘Leave me now,’ Grace said to them.
Her voice was clear and high. There had been no tears yet. Jake made as if to stay behind, but she motioned him away with the others. When they had gone she sat down again, in the chair she had occupied all night, and took hold of Anthony’s hand. She felt as if their square tower had been reduced by some cruel alchemy to powder, dust, and now the tower slowly collapsed, falling inwards within itself, the dust whispering, until only a cold and meaningless heap of it was left.
She looked at his face. It had closed up to her so quickly. He had been there and now he had gone, and she was left behind.
She let her head fall forward so that it rested against his cold hand. She wanted to cry, to rail and moan and howl, but she could not.
Cressida was screaming.
‘You wouldn’t let me. I wanted to see him. He called me, I heard him. I never said goodbye, and now I can’t because he’s dead. I only wanted to see him.’
‘I couldn’t let you into that room, Cressida. It was no place for a child.’
Cressida’s face contorted. The terrible, obvious pressure of her grief threatened to crack it open. ‘I hate you. I loved Daddy.’
The rage and venom were the more shocking because she had been such a silent, biddable child. Grace tried to hold her, but Cressida tore herself away. Grace did not know what to do, could think of nothing but removing her so that she could be alone again. She murmured to Jake, ‘Perhaps a sedative …?’
‘Let her grieve,’ Jake said.
Nanny came and led her away, still sobbing and howling out her misery.
Clio had come at once, but Grace would only see her briefly. They spoke on the telephone, when Grace finally accepted one of her calls.
‘We are postponing the wedding, of course.’
‘Why?’ Grace asked, with detached curiosity. ‘Anthony wouldn’t want you to do that. What difference could it possibly make, if you marry next week or next month?’
‘I just thought … with the funeral only two days before …’
‘Go ahead with your wedding, Clio. I don’t want you to postpone it.’
Clio was embarrassed, and disconcerted to find that the square face of death was hung about with the little veils of her own social anxiety.
‘If that is what you want,’ she said, a little harshly.
Grace seemed not to hear her. ‘It’s an odd irony, don’t you think, that I should lose my husband in the very week that you gain yours? We are like a pair of scales, perpetually unbalanced. A heavy weight in one pan, mysterious air in the other. Up and down, forever flying past each other.’
‘It is a cruel coincidence, yes,’ Clio said, unable to offer anything more.
Grace was sitting in her grey and rose-pink drawing room. She had been intending to write letters, the first replies to the flood of condolences, but she had not even picked up her pen. She stared down at the morocco edge of the blotter, at her wrist emerging from the cuff of her black dress. The physical world was unchanged. It was lewdly overfull of rustling and clattering things, of photographs in silver frames and crystal decanters and fur coats and sugar tongs, and yet in the face of such overpopulation she had to learn to take account of a vacancy so complete that it defied nature.
She could not measure the emptiness. When she tried to define it for herself the space ahead of her was trackless, unbroken by even a point of light. But yet it had to be measured, day by day. She had to travel through it because she was still alive. There was no objective, and no motive for travelling on except that she could not stop. Anthony had stopped. He had simply gone away, silently in the night, and this was the terrifying void in which he had left her.
The old world, the real world, was equally fearsome. It was the crowded detail of it that frightened her. The trays of food and the engraved cards and the jewellery in velvet boxes had once been familiar, but were now hideously distorted by her sudden recognition of their irrelevance.
Grace ran her fingers over the leather blotter, picked up her gold-nibbed pen and stared at it, then squared a sheet of her headed writing paper in front of her. None of these objects seemed related. Their pointless solidity was chilling.
She rested her forehead in her hand for a moment, wondering if she was unhinged.
Then she gripped the pen and made herself write, ‘My dear Tom’. She heard the bell ring downstairs, and the front door open and close. She had given orders that she was not to be disturbed. My dear Tom. What next, what did people say?
The drawing-room door opened.
Grace looked, and then dropped her pen.
‘Julius.’
He was unshaven and tired. He was carrying a canvas grip in one hand. ‘I’ve come straight from the boat train. I set off as soon as I heard.’
Uncertainly, she stood up. Julius put down his bag and came to her. His arms fitted around her but he was gentle, as if he knew that her bones felt brittle beneath her skin.
She stood quietly with her eyes closed.
Julius was solid, and he was a part of the old, real world, but he did not baffle or frighten her. He was simply there, seeming to fill a small corner of the windy space. She held on to him, her fingers curling in the thick stuff of his travelling clothes.
‘I am so pleased you are here,’ she whispered.
‘I am always here.’
He guided her to a sofa and made her sit down. He held her cold hands, rubbing them between his own. He did not know what he had been expecting to find, had not even allowed himself to imagine what manifestations of grief. He saw now that she was composed. Her hair was drawn tidily back from her white face, and her dark dress was elegant, with a pearl pin at the throat.
Of course, Grace would contain her sorrow. She would not let it spill out, like the viscera of some dismembered hunt quarry after the kill, for all the huntsmen to see. She would have her vulnerable and hidden face, but only Anthony would have seen that.
Julius felt a stab of jealousy, and the persistence of it sickened him.
Grace shivered. ‘Are you cold?’ he asked her. ‘Shall I ring to have the fire made up?’
‘No. Don’t move, I don’t want you to move.’
He went on rubbing her hands, feeling the fine bones move under his fingertips.
‘How are you?’ he asked. He couldn’t think of any way to dress up the threadbare conventionality of the question.
In a small, thin voice she said, ‘It was very sudden, you know. Just a day, really. If I had had more time to make myself ready, I might have been able to bear it better.’ Then she added, ‘But that isn’t true. Nothing would make it easy to bear the death of the person you love most in the world.’
He looked down at her hands, at the diamonds and the plain gold wedding ring.
‘Do you want to talk now?’ he asked gently.
‘Do I? I don’t know. I don’t know anything.’ She was shivering again. Julius got up and went to the tray of drinks on the table between the windows. He poured whisky into a glass and gave it to her. She sipped at it, and he heard the rim of the glass rattling against her teeth.
‘The funeral is tomorrow, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, Julius, the vulgar, meaningless refinement of it all. The order of service. The flowers. The casket. Like some – like some horrible padded box of chocolates, like a tart’s present, to put him in.’
She raised her head and saw Julius’s face. It was softened, blurred with his concern.
‘Couldn’t someone else have dealt with that? Your father? Hugo, or Jake? What have they bloody well been doing, damn them all?’
‘No, I had to deal with it myself.’
But his tenderness and his quick anger had unstopped something inside her, at last. She felt the tears sharp behind her eyes, and then they began to burn on her face, running down her cheeks.
‘Cry. Go on, cry,’ he ordered her.
She did cry, and he held her, and then he refilled her glass and listened while she talked.
Grace talked for a long time. She realized that since Anthony died she had hardly spoken, and now words spilt out with the tears. The happiest memories of Anthony came out mixed up with her horror of the formal arrangements that had to be made after his death. She talked about how much she had loved him, and then her face contorted with anger at him for deserting her. She said that Cressida was angry too, but with her, not her father. ‘She thinks it is my fault.’
‘Poor Grace. Poor Cressida, too.’
She told Julius about her fear of the void she had stepped into, and her feeling of disgust with the irrelevant material world.
‘You are shocked,’ he told her. He was relieved to hear her talking. The iron mask of composure was not so firmly set, at least. ‘Shock is disorientating. Didn’t Jake tell you that?’
‘Yes. Probably. I didn’t hear.’
‘Talk to me some more.’
‘Give me another whisky, then. Isn’t it strange that we should be drinking and talking here, with everything the same, while Anthony is dead?’
‘Yes. But it only looks the same. The truth is that it is all different, because he is dead.’
Grace frowned. The whisky was beginning to affect her. ‘How will I learn that? Sometimes I forget, you know, that it has happened. And then, the pain of remembering it again. Do you know, there probably isn’t any money?’
‘What?’
‘I saw the solicitor and Anthony’s father. Only briefly. They were treading very carefully. Something about the will. It seems Anthony might have transferred funds to New York. After the Hatry crash he must have thought it would be safer to be in American stocks and bonds. I don’t know for sure yet.’ She shrugged at the opulent room. ‘So many things.’
‘Don’t worry about it now.’ Julius had seen enough, in Berlin, of the absence of money. The lack of it seemed inconceivable here in South Audley Street.
‘I’m tired,’ Grace said. ‘But I can’t sleep. Tell me about Berlin.’
‘Such a city. Such a bizarre, startling, diverse place. You must come with me some day.’
‘Perhaps I will.’
Julius knew that she could conceive of nothing beyond her loss, and he did not try to press her.
The whisky decanter was almost empty.
‘What are you going to do?’ he whispered, when she had drained the last of it. He meant, sleep or sit up, but she chose to look further.
‘I don’t know what to do. Find out how to go on living without him, I suppose.’ It was like taking a breath of air without oxygen.
Julius saw her gasp, but he saw something else too, as clearly as if a bright light had flicked on in a pitch-black room. His certainty gave everything a hard-edged, polished clarity.
‘You must stand in his place. You must take Anthony’s seat in Parliament.’
Grace’s sudden laugh broke in her throat. ‘I hadn’t thought of that one.’ She stood up, and staggered a little. ‘You’ll have to help me up to bed, Julius. I’m half drunk.’
He led her upstairs, helped her off with her dress as gently as a lady’s maid, and left her under the covers with her arm protectively crooked over her eyes.
Clio was married two days after Anthony’s funeral.
In the last few days Miles alternated between bouts of morbid depression, in which he claimed repeatedly that he was not good enough for her, and fits of optimism when he promised her the moon and the stars as soon as his book was finished and his fortune was made.
‘I don’t want the moon or the stars,’ Clio said. ‘I just want you.’ She told herself that he was nervous, that they were both shocked by Anthony’s death. She wished that she could be alone to mourn her friend, but she did not want to let Miles out of her sight. Once they were married, she thought, there would be calm enough. There would be time then to console each other.
‘If you want me you shall have me, most precious piglet. Princess of piglets.’
‘Please, Miles.’ She was going to say, ‘No piglets, not now,’ but she caught his eye and the words stopped in her throat. Sometimes he was angry, and the anger alarmed her.
Miles said, ‘Come on, let’s go out. I have had enough of sitting here, watching you weep.’
Clio knew that he was drinking too much, but she went, because it was better than letting him go alone.
It was a subdued wedding ceremony. They were married as planned at St Pancras registry office, with Jake and Max Erdmann as their witnesses. Clio said ‘I do’ almost inaudibly, and accepted the narrow gold band that Miles gave her. She emerged, blinking in the thin sunlight of a cold November morning, as Mrs Miles Lennox.