On the face of it, the next years were tranquil ones. Clio went patiently to work, and from Fathom to the Mothers’ Clinic, and from the Clinic home again to Gower Street and Miles. Anyone who saw her, even Jake and Ruth, might comfortably have assumed that she was happy.
It was only Clio herself who knew otherwise.
Sometimes she felt that she had no reason to be less than content and so, by the forces of logic, she should actually be content. It must be that her recollection of the exact quality of happiness was imprecise, that her memory tricked her, by favouring what was in the past and was no longer accessible over what she knew now and could not escape from. There was nothing wrong with her life, she told herself, except her own perverse nature.
While these moods lasted she made herself take the slow steps through her routine with a sort of faltering optimism. If all was not well now, then some day it would be. Miles’s book would be finished and published to the proper acclaim; they would find a tune to their life together; she might even have a child.
At other times she knew that she was deeply unhappy. The sickening inevitability of it clogged all her movements and made her weary and dull.
Miles was the cause of her unhappiness, but he also provided the reason for continuing the unappetizing business of her life. She could think of no other explanation for her persistence in it. She no longer went to her job at Fathom for the pleasure or the interest of it, but to earn money. She apportioned the money very carefully, weighing every expenditure with miserly reluctance, so that it would stretch to supporting them both. She went out to the Clinic not because she wanted to give her help any longer, but in order to allow Miles peace and space to do his work. She did all this to hold on to their life together, but it was the life itself that was extinguishing her.
However often her thoughts travelled the same circuit, she could never reach any conclusion. Everything she did was done for Miles; Miles did not repay her. She did not relish the life she had; she could not bear to think of changing it, for what would she do otherwise?
But Clio’s sickened indecision was only a faint echo of Miles’s own.
His changes of mood were terrifying because of their violence and unpredictability. For days, sometimes weeks at a time, he was subdued. He would work, sitting in his armchair with a lined notepad on his lap, scribbling feverishly and then tearing the sheets from the pad and crushing them as if he wanted to wring blood out of them. When he was not scribbling he would stare ahead into some invisible universe, glassy-eyed with desperation, and then he would drop his head into his hands and his whole body would seem to shrink into the shelter of the chair.
At the lowest point he would turn to Clio, letting his head fall against her as she knelt beside him. ‘I can’t do it,’ he would whisper to her.
‘Yes, you can,’ she soothed him. It became an effort to put enough conviction into her voice. ‘Please, Miles. Won’t you let me read what there is, so I can reassure you?’
He hissed at her, ‘No. I can’t. It’s like pulling out your own viscera for public show. You don’t understand anything, do you?’
‘I try to,’ Clio said humbly. ‘But I am not just the public. And you let Tony Hardy read it, didn’t you?’
‘That sordid little money-grubber? Commerce is his only criterion. I don’t give a monkey’s fart for his ideas or his critical opinions. What does he know? Anyhow, that was long ago. I’ve rewritten every word since then, everything in it is new.’
A terrible fear and suspicion were beginning to burn in Clio. She tried to pinch them out, but they always started to smoulder again. She was afraid that there was no everything, that there was no great novel at all.
After Miles’s moods of depression, floods after drought, came the bursts of wild elation.
He would gather up his notepads and lock them away, and burn every crumpled, discarded sheet. He would swell up out of his chair until he seemed to fill the untidy little rooms. He would eat all the food that Clio had laid in, destroying her thrifty menus for a week, and laugh at her for her bourgeois anxiety.
‘The Lord will provide,’ he would exult. ‘Inspiration and macaroni cheese together.’
He would pull her close, kissing her with deliberate thoroughness until she felt herself unpeeling, like some bitter-skinned fruit, to reveal the pulp within her. She clung to him in her eagerness for his affection, but then Miles would stop what he was doing and look down at her. He would unwind his arms, very slowly, and then pat her shoulder, as if he had caught her in some act of indecency but was ready to forgive her.
‘Dear Piglet,’ he would murmur, and then he would wander away with his hands in his trouser pockets, or pick up a magazine and immediately become absorbed in it.
Clio would be left feeling cold and deflated. She had no doubt that he enjoyed exercising his power over her, and she understood that he used it because he felt powerless in so many other directions. What she did not know was whether he tried deliberately to hurt her, and so to localize his general anger with an unfair world, or whether he simply did not understand that she loved him and needed his love in return.
And then, in his moods of elation, Miles seemed to grow too large to be contained by the shabby walls of the flat.
At best he would call to Clio, ‘Come on, haven’t we been cooped up in this place long enough? Let’s go out. Let’s go and have a few drinks and talk to people. I’m tired of long faces and tapwater.’
He would seize her by the arm and march her off to Charlotte Street. They would join the group at the bar, any bar, standing rounds of drinks and accepting them in their turn, finding themselves sucked back into the tiny, greedy world of literary gossip. Clio would remember the old days and tell herself that nothing had changed except her own humour.
At worst, and it was much more often, Miles would go out without her. Once or twice, he emptied her purse before he left. When he came back he would be drunk, either melancholy-drunk or violent-drunk, and shouting out his resentment of Fitzrovia, other men’s successes, and his shrinking wife.
One night, looking for something on which to vent his rage, he blacked her eye. Clio told Jake that she had had one drink too many in the Fitzroy and had walked into the door in the ladies’ cloakroom. Her dissembling was so practised, had become so much second nature to her, that Jake believed her. She was vaguely surprised that her brother should be taken in by such a perfunctory lie.
‘You drink too much,’ Jake told her.
Clio knew that there was a brandy bottle in the drawer of Jake’s surgery desk, because she had seen it once when Jake opened the drawer to look for something else.
In the beginning, when his children were smaller and Ruth was too busy with them and with her work at the Mothers’ Clinic to have much attention to spare for him, Jake had bought the brandy and drunk a small tot after a long and more than usually disheartening surgery. The spirit had warmed him, and he had enjoyed the moment of calm and solitude, with the waiting room empty at last and his nurse gone home. He drank the measure and poured himself another. When he eventually went back to Islington, a little muzzy and vague in the head, the house had seemed untidy and unappealing. Ruth was banging plates in the kitchen and shouting at Lucas, but she did not seem to have noticed that Jake was late. Ruth was always busy and irritable. Jake knew that she had too much to do, but he saw that as her own choice. He resented her brusqueness, and the way that she turned heavily away from him in their bed at night and fell instantly into a deep sleep.
The first bottle emptied itself and was replaced. The thought of his quiet moment with it at the end of the day became a comfort for Jake.
Clio retorted, ‘You drink too much too. It’s the age we live in.’
They looked sombrely at each other, where once they might have made a joke about their habits. The times were changing. The frivolity and youthful optimism of the Twenties seemed to have receded with their own youth, and much farther than just over the arbitrary cusp that separated them from the new decade.
In the early years of the Thirties London seemed full of gaunt-faced men holding up placards that read, ‘I served my King and Country. All I ask is a Job.’ There were no jobs, and there appeared to be no policies that could create any. And in the pubs and studios, when conversation moved beyond the parochial concerns of publishing and painting, there had begun to be anxious talk of German rearmament. London had become a grim place, and life in it seemed beset by dreariness.
In the memory the post-war years seemed quaint and much more remote in history than the real passage of time indicated. Clio’s feelings exactly matched her sense of the period. She could hardly believe that she had once been the bright-eyed ingénue who had followed Pilgrim to the Eiffel Tower and had begged Max Erdmann for a job. Had she once believed that to sit behind a typewriter in Doughty Street or to lift a half-pint beer glass in the Fitzroy was to allow herself the dizzy freedom of the wide world?
The bitterness of her reflections brought her back to contemplation of her marriage. The cycle was unbreakable, a treadmill that went on through the days and into her dreams at night. Had she truly imagined that marriage to Miles would bring her the safety and calm, the fruitful and mutually rewarding literary partnership that she had longed for?
More and more, the truth became plain to her. She could not, any longer, pervert it with optimism or excuses.
Miles had married her to acquire a meal-ticket, a free bed with the drawback that it also contained her body, and an unpaid cook, cleaner and washerwoman. There was the added advantage, in his black fits, that she was unfailingly there to stroke his hair like a mother, and to shore up his weak and wandering ego.
All this Clio came to understand perfectly well, in the years between 1929 and 1932. She also understood that Miles was all she had, and that however miserable she might be, to be without him would be worse. She had learned to devote herself to him, and she could not, now, think of anything else she might do with herself.
Clio was vulnerable, but she had her pride. She had wanted to marry Miles, had even insisted upon it, and now that she found herself in this position she could not have borne to admit it to anyone. There were also a few occasions, very few but she clung to the thought of them with great tenacity, when Miles treated her with tenderness. She could not stop the old optimism from surging up, then.
As the months passed, to all outward appearances Clio was a happy wife, and a busy and useful contributor to her world. Eleanor’s veiled hints about the possibility of more grandchildren were obscure enough for Clio to pretend she did not hear them.
Grace sold the house in South Audley Street and moved with Cressida to a much smaller establishment near the river in Westminster. The little house was decorated and furnished with Grace’s usual flair but, once the work was done and they were installed, Grace seemed to feel that the place required no more of her attention. She entertained her new political allies in the upstairs drawing room, and gave occasional small dinners, but Vincent Street served her more as an extension of the House than as a home.
It was Blanche’s suggestion that Nanny Brodribb should come down from Stretton to look after Cressida in the simplified household, and Grace agreed at once. Thereafter Cressida saw much more of Nanny than she did of Grace herself.
Grace devoted her time and energy to politics. She was often in the House until late at night; she spoke regularly on her pet topics; and she sat on the numerous committees that dealt with women’s and children’s rights. There were regular trips north to the constituency, where she was popular with the local party and with the voters. She held her seat, with an increased majority, in the General Election of 1931, and under the National Government headed by Macdonald and Stanley Baldwin she began to be spoken of as a coming young woman. Her energy and stamina were apparently boundless.
Grace had discovered that work was an effective painkiller.
She had never done any before now, except for carrying trays up to Eleanor’s convalescents during the war, and she was surprised by her own ability to concentrate on what she was doing. If she kept the Indian Women’s Franchise Bill in the front of her mind then she could make herself forget, for quite long stretches of time, that Anthony was dead and she was alone.
The Vincent Street house contained few reminders of him, except in Cressida’s room where photographs lined the bureau and shelves, but its very smallness and silence made her remember how different the other house had been. She was glad to leave it behind in the morning, and she never hurried back to it at night.
Cressida was eleven. Grace had found a small private school for her in Pimlico, where the fees were reasonable and most of the other girls were the daughters of Army widows or disabled officers.
Nanny walked her there in the mornings and met her at the end of the day. Cressida was not exactly unpopular with her fellows, but she simply preferred not to enter into the intense friendships that the others enjoyed. They stopped asking her to tea at their houses because Cressida never accepted, and she did not invite anyone to come back to Vincent Street. She was happier to eat her tea in the kitchen alone with Nanny and Cook, who ran the house between them with the help of a daily, and then to go upstairs to read, or draw, or write stories for herself. The stories were always written in lined exercise books, bought with her pocket money from a corner newsagent on the way home from school. The stories were almost always about tiny domestic crises befalling happy, loving families. The crises were easily resolved. Cressida knew that her stories were dull, and she preferred them that way.
When they sat down to breakfast together Grace and Cressida dutifully asked one another about their respective days, but they did not talk very much otherwise. They very rarely spoke about Anthony.
If anyone had asked her whether she was happy, Grace would have said that she was content. She did not have any expectation of happiness. But, as it happened, nobody did ask her. Her busyness was an effective screen. Even Jake, who worried that she never allowed herself to cry or to be weak, did not presume to mention the fact of her prickly defensiveness to the coming young woman of the Conservative party.
Clio and Grace saw one another only rarely. The main link between their two households in these early years of the 1930s was Alice.
Alice was twenty in 1932. She had inherited her father’s height and her mother’s statuesque figure. She was neither graceful nor particularly pretty, but her large, oval face with regular features and wide, clear eyes that rarely blinked gave the impression that somehow she saw more than was apparent to other people. Her blunt manner made an odd contradiction to this impression of sensitivity.
Alice’s hair had always sprung off her broad forehead into thick curls, and in defiance of fashion she wore it long, in a Pre-Raphaelite cascade, or braided into thick coils over her ears. Phoebe Stretton called her the Dear Old Ox, or Patient Griselda, but the nicknames were not very apt. Alice was full of uncomfortable passions. She was clever but her cleverness lacked focus; she was affectionate but touchy; and she loved company, especially the company of good-looking young men, but was too shy to take much advantage of it when it presented itself.
Alice had come out two years earlier. Her Season had been a half-hearted affair because she was the last of the daughters, and even Blanche and Eleanor no longer had much appetite for the ritual. There had been her own dance in Oxford, shared with another girl, and the usual round of London dances in reciprocation. Alice had twice fallen desperately in love in the course of her year, but neither young man had quite come to the point of proposing marriage.
After that Alice tried hard to find something to do. Tabitha was still living at home in the Woodstock Road. Tabby was quietly religious, and she was content with her Church and with her job as a teacher in a local kindergarten. There had been some talk of Alice training as a teacher too, but that plan had come to nothing. She did a secretarial course instead and for a few months worked as a secretary to a London publisher, a friend of Max Erdmann. During the week she stayed with Clio and Miles in Gower Street, sleeping in the bedroom that had once been Julius’s. Miles mostly ignored her but he did not object to her being there, only remarking that the rent was useful. Clio was glad of her company.
But before she had been in the job very long Alice gave in her notice, for no particular reason. She went back to Oxford for a little while, where she worried Nathaniel and annoyed Eleanor with her lumpish indecision, and then made her surprise announcement.
‘I’m going to live with Grace,’ she said to Clio.
Alice had never lost the puppyish admiration for her older cousin that had sprung into focus when Anthony was electioneering at Stretton. Now that Grace was a member of Parliament herself, she was Alice’s heroine. Alice interested herself in economic affairs and unemployment and measures for the restoration of world trade, just so that she could talk intelligently to Grace about them. And Grace responded to her with a kind of absent-minded affection that occasionally kindled into direct if amused encouragement, making the flame of Alice’s devotion burn up even more brightly.
‘Why are you going to live with Grace?’ Clio asked.
Alice’s broad cheeks were hot with happiness. ‘I’m going to work for her. I’m going to be a kind of assistant. In her political work, you know. I shall deal with some of her correspondence, arrange her appointments diary, travel up to the constituency with her. There will be plenty to do.’
She was so proud that Clio had to swallow her instinctively doubting response. ‘I’m sure there will. It sounds very interesting.’
‘Grace can’t pay me very much, of course, but that doesn’t matter at all. I’ll have my bed and board, and I don’t need much else.’
Alice had a small income of her own, just as Clio did. It was like her, in the grip of one of her passions, to deny that she had any requirements beyond food and somewhere to sleep.
‘What does Pappy say?’ Clio asked.
Alice looked surprised. ‘He wants me to do whatever will make me happy.’
Clio nodded. Nathaniel had never been able to deny Alice anything that she wanted.
‘And what does Cressida think?’
Alice only shrugged. ‘You know what Cress is like. No one ever knows what she thinks. And Grace still imagines that we will be jolly company for each other.’
Clio said sharply, ‘Alice, you will be kind to her, won’t you? Cressida doesn’t have a very easy time.’
Alice only looked back at her out of her clear eyes. ‘What? Oh, yes, of course I will.’
So Alice moved into Vincent Street to become Grace’s willing lieutenant. When anyone telephoned the house it was usually Alice who answered, and it was Alice who was the guardian of Grace’s engagements diary, her correspondence, even her wardrobe. Alice had little interest in her own clothes, but she made painstaking lists of which outfit Grace had worn to which engagement, and with which accessories, so that she could rotate them efficiently for her.
Grace accepted the devotion lightly. She said that Alice was making herself very useful, that she seemed to be enjoying herself, and there was not much else that family needed to know about the arrangement.
Eleanor fretted a little to Clio. ‘Why does Alice want to act as some sort of unpaid secretary-companion to Grace?’
‘She needs to devote herself,’ Clio answered. ‘Alice needs a cause.’
‘And what about the people she meets there?’
Eleanor meant Grace’s political friends, of some of whom she and Nathaniel disapproved.
‘Alice isn’t a little girl any more. She can make her own judgements.’
‘You are all grown up,’ Eleanor said sadly. Clio saw the soft lines of regret in her face.
‘Aren’t you happy to see us all launched in the world?’
‘I wish you were babies again.’
Once, Eleanor remembered, long ago, she had gone into a bedroom where Jake and Julius were asleep. There had been the sound of the sea beyond the curtained window, so it must have been at one of the summer holiday houses. She had bent over Jake and he had stirred in his sleep, then reached up to put his hand in hers. She had held it, noticing the size of it, almost as big as her own where it had once been a tiny curl of fingers. She had leant over to kiss him and the scent of his head had been the same as his baby smell.
She was still young then, still the mother of young babies, but she was overwhelmed with the sense of loss of that one babyhood, and also by the awareness of time passing, declining, running away from her.
The feeling came back to her now. She made an effort to dispel it.
‘I suppose all women yearn for babies. And there are always the grandchildren.’
‘Yes,’ Clio said stiffly. ‘Always the grandchildren.’
Grace had told Cressida that Alice was coming to live in the house with them, and that Alice would be company for her because she was so busy herself.
‘I don’t need company,’ Cressida said. ‘I’m quite all right with Nanny and Cook.’
‘Company of our own kind, darling. Be a good girl, won’t you?’
That was all. Cressida withdrew further into her reading and her story-writing, and let Alice eagerly scoop up whatever crumbs of Grace’s life fell her way. She made it clear that she didn’t welcome Alice’s company, any more than Alice wanted to bestow it on her.
Early in 1932 there was a party at Vincent Street.
It was not a large, lavish party of the South Audley Street kind because Grace no longer had the money or the space to entertain on a grand scale, but still she liked things to be done properly, as she expressed it. She would give a little shrug as if to say: These are not my requirements, but it is what one must do.
‘Will you arrange some of your lovely flowers, darling?’ she asked Alice, and Alice brought in armfuls of striped lilies and arranged them in tall vases on the console tables in the drawing room. Streaks of tigerish pollen daubed her nose when she looked in the glass in her bedroom. They made her look interestingly pagan. She smiled at the thought as she rubbed them away, and changed into her best dress with a puff-sleeved bolero to cover her shoulders. As an afterthought she wound a tiger-print scarf in her curls.
‘You look splendid,’ Grace called over her shoulder. She was filling one of Anthony’s monogrammed silver boxes with Turkish cigarettes.
‘I wish I could look like you.’
Grace laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. My looks are no longer an issue of any significance. Whereas you have everything ahead of you.’ Downstairs the bell rang. ‘Oh God, right on the dot, of course.’
Alice had addressed and posted the cards of invitation so she knew all the guests by name, if not by sight. But she did not immediately recognize the tall man who came in alone when the party was at its height. He stood in the doorway, waiting with lazy expectancy as if he knew the company would come to him, rather than being under any obligation to make a foray into it.
Alice saw Grace detach herself from a group of people and go to greet him. He took both her hands and kissed her on the mouth. Alice was near enough to them to overhear what he said. The man’s voice was low, but his proximity seemed to sharpen her ears.
‘Ah, Grace. I wish you had come with us. We could have achieved so much, with the right blood.’
‘You may yet achieve it. But I must stay where I am, you know.’ Then she turned, still holding his hand. In a different voice she said, ‘Look, everyone is here. Won’t you come and meet?’
It happened that Alice was part of the group Grace drew him into. He seemed to know everyone but her. When Grace came to introduce him and he held out his hand to shake hers she looked up at him. He was dark, with black horizontal brows and sharp, bright eyes. He had a dark moustache and a mouth that crooked at one corner.
‘Alice, this is Sir Oswald Mosley. My cousin, Alice Hirsh.’
‘Tom,’ the man said. He had a firm grip.
Alice knew who he was before Grace told her his name. Sir Oswald Mosley had been a Labour politician, a Cabinet member, until the year before. He had left the party and with five other MPs had founded his own New Party. There had been much talk, and more promises. Yet, for some reason, the New Party had failed to attract the membership its founders had hoped for. Left-wing newspapers were beginning to describe the new organization as ‘fascist’, and Mosley had just returned from a visit to Mussolini in Rome.
But still, Oswald Mosley’s brilliance was widely admired. People even now spoke of him as a future Prime Minister.
Alice felt her mouth drying and a red flush spreading over her collarbones beneath the bolero jacket.
‘You are Grace’s cousin,’ he said. He was examining her, still smiling. Alice wanted to keep his attention, but at the same time she wished he would move on and leave her to shrink back into anonymity.
‘Yes. Our mothers are twin sisters.’
‘Of course. I remember now.’
Did he? she thought wildly. Why should he remember something as trivial as that?
‘Tell me your name again.’
She was almost whispering. ‘Alice. Alice Hirsh.’
‘Hirsh?’ Mosley nodded. He pushed his lips out under the soft bristle of his moustache as if committing the syllables of her name to memory. Then he drew his heels together and made a small, precise bow. He was swept away at once by a dozen other people competing for his attention.
Alice stepped backwards. She folded her hands behind her. The palms were damp, and they made a tiny kissing sound when she pressed them against Grace’s cream-painted wall. From her corner Alice watched Tom Mosley moving through the current of the party. He was like a river pike, she thought, in the shoals of minnows.
She was still watching as he left, escorted to the door by Grace. When he had gone the room seemed dimmer. Alice looked up to see if one of the little electric bulbs had failed under its cream silk shade.
The party was a success, as Grace’s parties always were. The last group of guests bore Grace away with them, to dine at the Savoy Grill.
‘Will you be all right, darling?’ she called to Alice.
‘Yes. Of course I will. Have a lovely time.’
When she was alone she made a slow circuit of the room. The ashtrays were filled with reddened butts and the tables were ringed with the interlocking prints of cocktail glasses. The air was heavy with smoke, and the final musk notes of a dozen different perfumes.
There had been other parties, similar in almost every respect, but even the stale air of this one seemed to contain a new and significant scent. Alice lifted her head, like one of the foxhounds in the Stretton coverts. She picked up the discarded glasses and examined each one before placing it on a tray. Was this the one the man had used?
It took her a long time to clear the drawing room. Cressida did not appear at any point. Alice took the glasses and ashtrays down to the kitchen and helped Mabel and Nanny to wash them up.
It was the end of the following day before Alice encountered Grace again. Cressida had already gone to bed when Grace came home from the House and dropped her fur wrap on one chair, her bag and gloves on another, her papers on a third.
‘Dear Lord, what a day. Anything in the post, darling?’
‘Nothing important. Lots of thank-you notes. Shall I fix you a drink?’
‘Whisky and water, very weak.’ Grace kicked off her suede shoes and rested her feet on the sofa cushions. She took the glass that Alice gave her and watched her over the rim of it.
‘The evening went off well,’ Alice said.
‘Marvellous clearing up job, lamb, I do appreciate.’
‘I’m happy to do it. I enjoyed it all,’ Alice answered truthfully. And then after a minute, ‘I … thought he was rather impressive.’
‘Who’s that?’ Grace murmured.
‘Sir Oswald. Um, Tom.’ She wanted to talk, like Phoebe and Tabitha when they were giggling girls, but part of her also wanted to keep this new scent to herself, hoarding it, lest it should evaporate. She pretended to be busy with the coal scuttle. Grace said nothing, waiting until Alice had to look round at her again.
After a moment their eyes met.
‘I shouldn’t fall in love with Tom Mosley, if I were you,’ Grace drawled.
‘I hadn’t thought of doing anything of the kind.’ Alice went stiff with indignation. ‘I said I thought he was interesting. His ideas interest me, that’s all.’
‘Do you know what his ideas are?’
Alice knew something. She knew that his New Party had been formed less than a year before in contempt of the old men of politics. Its goals were an ending to class warfare and the introduction of radical economic measures to bring prosperity back to the nation. She knew that Mosley believed in government by a small, strong executive without much accountability to an enfeebled Parliament, and she had heard the same principles described as fascist.
But somewhere, she remembered, she had heard or read a claim of Mosley’s. He had said that, given a quarter of a million pounds and the support of a press baron, he could ‘sweep the country’.
The words had stirred her then, that was why she remembered them. Now they came back to her, and affected her more deeply. The country needed to be swept. All the stifling ills of stale government by timid old men, the economic cowardice and unemployment and the miasma of failure that gripped them now, they all needed to be bundled up and swept away.
The man with the black moustache and the bright, penetrating eyes was the one to do it. Alice was suddenly certain of that. He was brave enough, and he had the determination. It was the raw potential of his power that she had scented last night, through the smoke and the lilies and the women’s perfume.
The New Party had failed, but Mosley’s bearing seemed to indicate that that did not matter. Alice felt within herself that it did not matter either. There was a way forward, she was sure of that, and she knew that Tom Mosley could find it. The country would be swept.
If I could be part of that, she thought. She held the idea within herself, protecting the flare of it as if she cupped her hands around a flame.
Grace was lying back against the cushions. One silk-stockinged foot drew apparently idle circles, but she was watching Alice intently.
‘He asked you to join his party, didn’t he?’ Alice demanded.
‘Yes. I thought hard about it. I admire him personally, like all sorts of other people from Bob Boothby to Aneurin Bevan. I also think that his economic ideas are very sound. But in the end I decided I could be more useful by staying where I am, within our own party.’
You were afraid to risk your own seat, Alice silently translated. Oh, if I had been in your place, I would have gone.
‘In the end he only recruited five Labour MPs and one Conservative. I think subsequent events, catastrophic election results and the pitched battles and the violence that seem to follow him wherever he goes, have proved me right.’
‘What will he do now?’ Alice asked.
‘I should still like to see him doing something splendid. Heading some force for change that would be clear-cut and strong and incontrovertible.’
‘Like Hitler in Germany?’
‘Perhaps,’ Grace mused. ‘But I don’t think that anything as modern and coherent as Hitler’s movement will ever be possible in this poor, damp, vacillating country of ours.’
‘I would like to go and hear Mosley speak. I would like to offer to help him. I could do that, couldn’t I?’
Grace swung her feet down on to the floor. Her glass was empty now. ‘Yes, you could do that. Only what will Nathaniel say if he discovers you marching in uniform with the fascist youth bands?’
‘I don’t wear a uniform and I shan’t march.’ Alice frowned and her solemn face went red. ‘Anyway, Nathaniel isn’t a Bolshevist, you know.’
‘Of course he isn’t. But I don’t believe he is a great admirer of Hitler or Mussolini either.’
‘I know that. But I must find out what I believe in myself, mustn’t I? Pappy would defend my right to do that, he would defend anyone’s.’
‘Yes, he would. And so would I,’ Grace said softly.
Alice went to hear Mosley speak.
The first time was in Trafalgar Square, and she walked there from Vincent Street through the mild London sunshine. There was only a small crowd; Sir Oswald Mosley stood on the plinth at the foot of Nelson’s Column and a little corps of eight young men wearing black shirts and grey flannels surrounded him. Alice was able to come close to him, and he seemed to speak directly to her. She found that she could not take her eyes off his face.
‘We must be the movement of youth,’ he told the crowd. He had an orator’s voice, rising and falling as rhythmically as music. ‘We must gladly accept discipline, and the effort, and the sacrifice, because only by accepting these can great purposes be achieved. By these alone can the modern state be built.’
His words seemed to enter Alice’s blood.
After the rally was over she walked home again alone, wishing that she could have followed Mosley and his young men. The streets she passed along seemed to glimmer with a light as hard and bright as diamonds, and all the soot-stained buildings were cleaner and sharper and seemed to stand higher against the colourless sky.
It came to her suddenly that she did have something to be proud of in being British, and that she was ready to defend it against apathy and degeneracy and the creeping tide of Bolshevism. She lifted her head and swung her arms as she walked.
Grace was, as usual, not at home, but Alice met Cressida on the landing outside her bedroom.
‘How was the great rally?’ Cressida asked.
In the flush of her excitement Alice said warmly, ‘It was marvellous, utterly marvellous. You should have come, I wish you had heard what he had to say.’
Cressida blinked. Her pale, short eyelashes gave her a myopic appearance, although she saw perfectly well. ‘You wish I had been there? I wouldn’t go anywhere near muck like that. I am a socialist.’
Cressida had recently adopted a left-wing stance. Grace was amusedly tolerant of her political posturing – when she took any notice of it at all – but Alice found it deeply irritating. Alice was too serious and too literal-minded to be amused by the notion of a twelve-year-old socialist.
‘You only claim to be one because you want to oppose Grace.’ Opposing Grace was the most incomprehensible aim, to Alice.
‘Not just Mummy. Grandfather and good old Uncle Hugo with their feudal notions and military-minded Uncle Thomas as well, actually.’
‘What do you know about anything?’
‘As much as you, dear Alice. I can read, can’t I? And listen and make up my own mind.’
‘You’re just a stupid little girl.’
‘I’m not stupid, stupid.’ Cressida lashed out with a clenched fist. With all her weight behind it the blow connected with Alice’s arm, and Alice gasped with pain. She was ready to hit back, but then with an effort she regained control of herself. She was always conscious of her own dignity, and she didn’t want Grace, or even Nanny or Mabel, to hear that she had been fighting with Cressida like an infant in the schoolroom. She turned and walked away, still quivering with anger.
Cressida watched her go. Her fists were still clenched, and her stolid face was mottled with hatred.
Alice learnt to be circumspect about her new-found zeal. There were more meetings and rallies to be attended as the British Union of Fascists slowly emerged under Mosley’s leadership, and Alice slipped away to join the swelling, uneasy crowds whenever she was able. Her work for Grace didn’t fill all her time, and she was often able to absent herself from Vincent Street. But she did not talk much about what she saw and heard. She kept the fire of her devotion well shielded, away from the crass misjudgements of those who would not understand it.
There began to be scuffles and then full-blown fights at some of the meetings, between Mosley’s supporters and bands of hostile anti-fascists. Alice watched the battles indignantly, but she was proud when hecklers and communists were thrown out by the Blackshirts.
At one meeting there were persistent interruptions from a trio of men up in the gallery of the hall. Mosley raised his arm and pointed his finger. Alice shivered, as if he pointed at her instead.
His accusation rang out. ‘There you see three warriors of class war, all from Jerusalem.’
It was the first time Alice had heard him single out the Jews as a target. He said afterwards, to qualify his words, ‘Fascist hostility to Jews is directed against those who finance communists, and those who are pursuing an anti-British policy.’
Alice believed what he said. Of course, anyone who gave money to support communism or worked against the national good should be a target, whatever his faith or nationality. If any Jews did such things, then they must be prevented from doing so.
After that meeting there was a march. Mosley and seventy of his young men marched along Fleet Street and down Whitehall to their headquarters. The men wore their black shirts, and they strode along without coats or hats, singing and calling out the Union’s rallying cries. There were no women with them, but Alice slipped along in their wake, almost a part of the rabble of anti-fascists that scuffled at the tail of the march.
The singing and the sound of marching feet and the sight of Tom’s handsome head held high at the front of the column were almost unbearably stirring. There were tears in Alice’s eyes. She would have done anything for the cause at that minute.
The pain was in the reality that there was nothing she could do except run along behind the men.
Perhaps her chance would come. She watched the bareheaded young men swarming into the party headquarters in a great burst of cheering before she turned away and made her way back home.
Clio and Jake saw what was happening, but they also did not see.
Alice had discovered a vein of secrecy within herself. When she met her brother or sister it was easy to convince them that she cared about nothing but being Grace’s secretary-assistant, eagerly hanging on at the outer fringe of her cousin’s political life. The pretence that it was not important, did not even exist, made the flame of her new devotion burn brighter and sweeter inside her.
There was sly excitement in coming back from a Blackshirt rally with the Leader’s oratory like a bell in her head, to Gower Street or Islington or just to Vincent Street, and seeming to be the same Alice that she had always been.
The knowledge that she was not the same nourished her more richly than any food could have done.
She had always been the baby of the Babies, the youngest one of all the brothers and sisters and cousins, the last to arrive at the table when all the knowledge and wisdom and experience were being dished out, but now she felt herself growing big and strong. She alone knew where the future must lie. She was superior to all of them. Superior even to Grace. Alice thought that in her heart Grace understood and believed in the right way, but she was weak enough to let political expediency dilute her intentions.
As it happened, Alice underestimated what Clio and Jake did know. Separately, they were aware of their sister’s growing fanaticism, but for different reasons they were unwilling to admit it to each other, or even to themselves.
To Jake, Alice was still partly a little girl. He cherished the memory of her as an innocently demanding toddler in the last summer before the war. Alice had slept on a rug with her curls damp against her flushed face whilst he was importuning his cousin Grace in the angle of a hawthorn hedge. Alice belonged in those pre-war days, when the world had seemed to Jake to be a sunny and equable place. That was before the trenches and the stretchers, and the rare quiet times between bombardments when he had sat reading Donne by the light of a paraffin lamp.
He ruined me and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
The words came back to Jake with peculiar resonance now. The world had not regained its sunniness for long, and darkness and death had become over-familiar presences in his medical practice. There was a particular bitterness in the possibility that Alice might be affected by this darker world, and so he chose to convince himself that she was not.
Jake was repelled by the anti-Semitism of the Blackshirt movement. There was a bad evening at Islington, when Alice was sitting down to a family supper with him and Ruth and the children, Rachel and Lucas. Out of nowhere, out of nothing more than the small currency of exchanged news and domestic opinions, had come a disparagement of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in Germany.
Alice had laid down her knife and fork. She lifted her head and Jake saw that her eyes were wide, and very bright, the pupils like black glass.
She began to parrot the old propaganda. There were good Jews, like Nathaniel. Like Levi and Dora Hirsh and Ruth’s mother and father. And there were bad Jews, corrupt financiers who embezzled and stole and who undermined the economy and gave money to the communists. The bad Jews must be punished. They must repay what they had stolen. Stolen from us, Alice said.
Ruth had gasped. For once, she was at a loss for words.
Looking from his Jewish wife to the round, smooth faces of his Jewish children, Jake had felt sick. He had felt as if the ground shivered along some fault under the floorboards, under the folds of the cloth that covered his dining table, and that at any moment a fault might crack open and they would be pitched in different directions, some of them landing on one side of the chasm and some on the other, and some of them vanishing into the blackness itself.
And yet … Alice was his sister, and he loved her as he loved all of his family. He felt that they were all bound together by threads that spun out of the Woodstock Road and held them tight for ever. It was because he loved his mother and father that he couldn’t tell them that their beloved Alice had joined the Women’s Movement of the British Union of Fascists. It hurt him that he did not know for certain that she had, that she left him to guess and to imagine the worst. And it cut him that she could come to his house, and say such things in front of Ruth and the children. Yet he loved her as much as he loved the children. More, perhaps, than he loved their sharp and combative mother these days. Jake was not sure how the gulf had opened between Ruth and himself, or how long ago, but now that it was there he had no idea how to bridge it again. They went through all the rituals of living a domestic life together, but the sharp pleasure that they had once known in being together had now entirely faded. They existed side by side, and curbed their irritation with one another as best they could.
He found some inadequate words. ‘That is enough of that talk at my table, Alice.’
Ruth had glanced at him, a hard look that seemed to say, Is that all?
And Jake had looked away from her to his sister, who coolly met his eye. Then she had smiled. Her top lip lifted, showing her white teeth and her gums, making her look like some healthy and utterly unquestioning farm animal.
The excuse that Jake chose to make to himself for his sister’s sudden and frightening allegiance was male, and doctorly. He knew that Mosley was a handsome and charismatic man, and that the youths who marched behind him were mostly well setup, and shown off to their best advantage by the buttoned-up black shirts and fascist insignia of their uniforms. He decided that Alice was in the grip of a sexual fixation, intensified by the charged atmosphere of rallies and marches. Her ill-informed fascist enthusiasms would soon pass, he told himself, once she was safely married.
There was the risk that she might be carried off by one of the young thugs of the movement, but almost none of them was of her class or background. Jake reasoned that she was much more likely to be claimed by one of the scions of Tory families who passed through Grace’s drawing room. He thought that would answer her real inclinations. And once she was properly bedded, this dangerous phase would be over.
It was a reassuring line of thought, but the pursuit of it stirred other ideas within Jake. He sat in his surgery after the last patient had gone home. He took the brandy bottle out of the bottom drawer of his desk and poured a measure into the medicine glass kept for the purpose. He tipped the spirit into his mouth and thought about Ruth, tracing in his mind’s eye the creases that ran under her belly and the mottled veins that had begun to spread over her thighs. He could hear her remonstrative voice in his head.
Then he began to consider other possibilities. Moving slowly, heavily, he stood up and went to his coat that hung from the hatstand in the corner. He took a notebook from his pocket, and referred to it before he lifted the telephone receiver.
Clio knew, or guessed, how deeply Alice was being drawn into the net of fascism. But she did not discuss her fears with Jake and Ruth out of a kind of delicacy, a respect for the Jewish solidity of their family life and shame for Alice. She also had the idea that it was not Alice who was finally to blame, but Grace.
It was Grace who allowed, or even encouraged, Alice’s allegiance to Mosley. Grace had introduced her to him, in her own drawing room. It was Clio’s belief that Grace was drawn to the movement herself, but was too careful of her own position to admit it openly. But through Alice’s membership she could experience it vicariously, in perfect safety. Through her silly, adolescent devotion to her cousin, Alice had become a pawn in Grace’s game.
Clio had hardly seen Grace since Alice had gone to live in Vincent Street, but she felt the old, dissonant chords of mistrust and suspicion begin their deep vibrations all over again.
However, the main reason for Clio’s failing properly to stand guard over her sister was nothing to do with Grace, or even with Alice herself. As the winter of 1932 came, and Clio’s third wedding anniversary passed, she was increasingly preoccupied with the tightening spiral of her own life.
It was a cold winter, and fog-bound, murky chill descended on London and settled in the dingy Gower Street rooms. Miles was drinking heavily and seemed lately to have given up all pretence of working. They had very little money. Resentment against him flared up in Clio when he wasted what they did have, but she smothered it rather than allowing it to erupt into one of the vicious arguments that her husband seemed almost to enjoy.
Clio was weary, and the weariness oozed out of her in a series of small illnesses. There was a cold, and then a gastric infection, and then another cold that she could not shake off. She had almost never been ill in her life before, and the experience made her feel even weaker and more helpless than ever. The days spent lying in the disordered bedroom, wondering when Miles would slam out of the house or come banging back again, were the dreariest she had ever spent. Her sense of a lost, parallel life that they might have lived together if only an elusive detail or two could have been changed was heightened by his occasional kindnesses.
Sometimes he brought her a tray, with invalid food invitingly prepared and a nonsensical poem rolled in her napkin ring.
‘I’m sorry to be such a wet blanket,’ Clio said, trying not to cry as she twisted the scroll of paper in her fingers.
‘Poor old blanket,’ Miles said lightly. He bent over to kiss the top of her head and then slid away, out to the Fitzroy, or Soho, or wherever it was he spent his time.
Jake came to see her and pronounced that she was run down and anaemic, and needed a change of scene.
‘Can’t you get Miles to take you away somewhere? You’ve got no children, no real ties. You could go away for the rest of the winter, to the south of France, or Morocco, even. There’s no reason to stay here.’
‘And there’s no money to take us anywhere else.’ She tried to smile, and Jake did not seem to see the bitterness in it. ‘I shall have to make do with Christmas in the Woodstock Road.’
That year, Miles would only consent to leave London with her for two days. Nathaniel and Eleanor did their best to make it a happy family Christmas, but it was a gloomy festival. Alice came home, filled with a glittering, unfocused brightness that seemed to strike at an awkward angle off all of them. Ruth could barely speak to her.
Ruth had only ever come to spend Christmas holidays with her husband’s parents out of a belief in family solidarity. She always disapproved of Nathaniel’s secular enjoyment of a Christian festival, and this year with the spectre of Alice’s fascism gliding between them all she had tried to refuse Eleanor’s invitation.
Eleanor had begged her. ‘The children love it so. It isn’t Christmas without children, Ruthie.’
In the end, they came. Luke and Rachel were duly spoilt with stockings and too many presents beneath the tree and too much to eat. Over-excitement turned to bad temper and then tears, and Ruth darted her sharp, hard glance at Jake to say, I told you so.
Miles ate as much as he could of Eleanor’s good food, and drank volumes of Nathaniel’s College claret and nineteenth-century port. He was charming and amusing, as he always could be when it suited him.
Clio sat coughing and snuffling on a sagging sofa in the room that overlooked the frozen garden. Staring up at The Janus Face it came to her that she hated the portrait.
‘Why do you keep that horrible thing hanging there?’ she asked Nathaniel.
Nathaniel was surprised. ‘It’s a fine painting. He’s caught the look of both of you.’ The old tease of John Leominster was long forgotten. ‘Besides, I’m fond of the man. What’s become of him?’
‘Pilgrim?’ Clio had recently met Jeannie in Charlotte Street. The artist’s model looked fifteen years older than her real age. Jeannie’s news was that Pilgrim and Isolde were in Berlin together.
‘He likes it. Says it is divinely decadent. Don’t know why he wants to be there, with Hitler and all the rest of them,’ she told Clio, and coughed derisively through the smoke of her cigarette. ‘How’s that lovely brother of yours?’
‘Pilgrim has probably seen him more recently than I have.’
Julius had not come home for Christmas. He sent imaginative presents for all of them, and a long letter mostly concerned with his work.
‘Pilgrim is in Berlin too, I believe,’ Clio answered her father.
Nathaniel’s face turned sombre. ‘I wish Julius would come back. It is time he came home.’
Clio tried to be light. ‘Perhaps there’s a reason for him to stay. Perhaps there’s a girl.’ Only it was more likely that Julius stayed in Berlin because it was easier not to see the only girl he wanted, than to see her and be unable to have her.
‘Perhaps,’ was all Nathaniel would admit, without a smile.
New Year came and went. Clio and Miles did not stay up to see in 1933. Miles was in the grip of one of his depressive fits, and Clio did not believe that the new year would bring anything different from the old one, so had no reason to celebrate it.
January was cold, and fog-bound, and the blackened façades of the very buildings seemed to exude a miasma of soot and ice as Clio plodded past them on her path between Fathom and Gower Street. On the thirtieth of the month Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and torchlight parades of brownshirts marched through Berlin to the cheers of the crowds.
Clio fell ill again. On the last day of January she got up and went to the office, to finish work on the proofs of the next issue. But by lunchtime she was coughing so much that Max Erdmann came out of his office.
‘Go home, Clio, for God’s sake. Go to bed, and don’t let me see you again until you are fit company.’
Max was being kind to her. It made Clio think that she must be really ill. She put the cover on her typewriter and took her coat off its peg. She walked back through the Bloomsbury squares, where the dripping branches of the plane trees made frayed black lace-work against the yellowish sky.
She collected the morning’s post from where it lay on the mat inside the front door and went up the stairs. Her feet felt heavy, and she tried to suppress the need to cough that sawed in her chest.
She put the key in the lock of their door, turned it and pushed the door open. She saw at once that the gas fire was burning under its little domed hood, but the sitting room was empty. Miles had gone out and left it on. The thought of the shillings ticking away in the meter made her angry. She coughed, and threw the sheaf of letters down on the table.
Then she stopped. The flat was very still, filled with an odd silence that seemed to press outwards on the walls and windows. The sounds she made were amplified beyond their proper value.
Clio walked through to the door of her bedroom and opened it.
Miles and another man were lying in the bed together.
There was a rush of sensations, seeming to make a great noise and confusion in her head. She saw that her husband was lying on his back, with one arm crooked behind his head. The sheet had fallen back to expose his naked chest and the marble-white roll of flesh below his rib-cage. She saw that the other man was black-haired, and that he looked as rough and dirty and dispirited as the husbands of any of the women who came to Jake’s clinic.
Was this what people would do for money? Clio thought.
She had no doubt that this was a commercial transaction.
Miles did not move. He only looked back at her, in defiance, or a kind of relief.
Clio knew that she would remember his exact expression. She would remember the other man’s coarse features, the way his fingers on her bedsheet were rimmed with black. She would remember each detail, even through the tumultuous confusion of horror, and revulsion, and shame that threatened to overpower her now. She would not be able to forget.
The tableau was like some terrible caricature of her marriage, with this man lying prone in her place. Whenever she thought of her marriage she would see this, the two faces staring at her.
She took two steps backwards, with her hand cupped over her mouth. Her fingers were shaking. With the other hand she groped for the door handle. She found it, smooth and hard, and jerked sharply at it. The door closed and she was left staring at the wooden panels. There was dust in the mouldings and in one spot a rash of tiny splinters, like the stubble of a man’s beard.
The unopened post was still lying on the table where she had left it no more than a minute before, aeons ago. Outside in the street it already seemed to be growing dark. She could hear the traffic swishing past.
Clio left the flat and went back down the stairs and into the freezing afternoon.
With no idea of where she wanted to go or what she might do she began to walk. She walked a long way, through the streams of shoppers in Oxford Street and then down the shining wet arteries of Hyde Park. It was intensely cold and she walked quickly, trying to keep the blood moving inside her. The briskness of her movements contradicted her sense of having come up against a blank wall, at the end of a mean cul-de-sac that her life had become. The route did not offer any way forward, or any escape to either side, and she did not see how she could go backwards and undo what had already been done.
On the other side of the Park the trickle of homegoing office workers became a steadier flow. She had no idea where she had been, and could not have retraced her steps. She went into a workmen’s café and sat at a zinc-topped table warming her fingers around a thick white mug of tea. She ordered pasty slices of white bread and butter and then sat staring out through the steamy glass without touching them. She paid for what she had ordered with fumbling fingers, staring at the coins as if they were some unfamiliar currency, and then left the shelter of the café to walk on again.
She had not intended it, and had given no thought to the direction her feet took her, but in the early darkness she found herself standing at the end of Vincent Street. She looked at the lights of Grace’s house, and then saw that there was a taxicab waiting outside. The motor was running and the cabbie had wound down his window. Clio could see the plump cloud of his breath.
The front door opened and Grace bobbed down the steps. She was wearing her furs and carried a leather portfolio under her arm.
Clio took a few steps, uncertain whether to turn forward or back, and then she began to run. Her feet were pinched and blistered in her office shoes and her legs and her chest ached.
She called out, ‘Grace! Grace, wait for me …’
It reminded her of when they were children, running over the sand after the boys, each of them determined not to be left behind, not to come panting and last to the latest discovery.
Grace heard the uneven clatter of Clio’s heels. She turned and saw her running, then put out her arm to catch her. They swayed together for an instant, as if they both might fall. Then Grace steadied them. There was a streetlamp in its blueish nimbus over their heads, and by the light of it Grace looked into her cousin’s face.
‘Come with me,’ Grace ordered her.
The cab rumbled along the Embankment. Inside it Clio felt placid in her exhaustion, with the lights outside swimming in the river mist and the driver’s broad back insulated beyond the thick panel of glass. She was conscious of Grace’s profile rising out of the silver-tipped swathe of fur. In the regular slices of light, before the darkness claimed her in its turn, she could see the sheen on her silk-covered calves and the neat Louis heels of her shoes. Her kid-gloved hands were folded on the leather portfolio.
There did not seem to be any need to recite what had happened.
Are you really going to marry that little queer?
Clio could hear the words as if Grace had only just uttered them.
They were almost at the House of Commons before Grace broke the silence. Her kid forefinger tapped the leather in her lap. ‘I’m speaking in the House tonight. The debate is on women in prison, you know. Will you sit in the gallery to hear me?’
‘Yes.’ Clio’s voice cracked. She said more loudly, ‘Yes. I would like to hear you.’
She found herself in the Visitors’ Gallery. It was almost deserted. She leant over the balcony and looked down into the chamber of the House, thinking how small it was. There were men’s bald heads and red faces, and so few women amongst the men. Grace came in, having removed her furs and her hat. She looked up at Clio as she took her seat.
Clio listened to the debate, and at the same time her mind slipped and looped through the nets of memory. Distant events, childhood times, all rose up and haphazardly jumbled with the sharp details of today, and the dreary planes of the last months. She felt rudderless, able to swing with the currents, and her random meditations threw up at one minute an image of children’s initials carved in a desktop, at the next the black fingernails of the male prostitute lying in her bed.
The debate went on. There was so much rhetoric, Clio thought. So many flying words and unpinned ideas that would all drift together in the end, into random heaps, like dead leaves to be stirred up by the wind. She felt cold, and she wrapped her arms around herself and tried to concentrate on the speeches. She knew that she was feverish and that she should go home to bed, only she had already tried to do that and now she could never get into that bed again.
Grace was on her feet. She had taken notes out of her folder, but she did not look at them. She spoke in her natural voice, calm and fluent. She began to describe the plight of women prisoners, their enforced separation from their babies and small children, mistreatment by prison warders and brutal conditions.
Poor women, Clio thought. She gazed down on the rows of men, but she began to see the faces of the women who had swirled past her in the streets that afternoon. With her feverish sharpness of recall she could see individual sets of features, young and old, preoccupied or vacant, hopeful or desperate or dull. Amongst them she began to see herself, as a child and then a young woman, and Eleanor was with her, and there were other women she knew around them, from each of the different strata of her life.
Pity for all of them warmed inside her. She was sorry for Eleanor and Blanche, left behind by the unrolling of time, and for Ruth who could not make Jake happy, and for Alice and Cressida, and desperately merry Phoebe and poor, sodden Jeannie, and Isolde who wasted her brightness on Pilgrim; and she was sorry for herself.
Down on the floor of the House Grace began to wind up her speech. She quoted statistics on repeated offenders and the effect on them of a more liberal prison regime. Her arguments for penal reform for women were cogent, persuasive.
Clio did not feel sorry for Grace. Somehow, as always, Grace seemed to stand apart from her, and to be ungoverned by the common rules. Grace was so strong, and Clio knew that she needed that strength now. She had come for it, seemingly unwittingly, walking blindly through the streets on the darkest day she had ever known.
Grace’s speech was well received. A confused rumble of ‘Hear! Hear!’ rose up to the Gallery as she sat down.
The debate wandered on. So many words, Clio thought again. The confusion of memories claimed her.
When she looked down to Grace’s seat once more she saw that it was vacant, and a moment later Grace appeared beside her. ‘Come home with me now,’ she commanded.
They took a cab, driven by a different man in a frieze coat, back through the foggy streets. The house in Vincent Street was quiet and warm. Nanny and Mabel the cook must already have retired to bed, because when Grace led Clio downstairs the kitchen was empty. Grace made Clio sit in the chair beside the stove while she heated milk and found a tin of cocoa, and it came to Clio that she had not seen her perform any domestic task since the days of carrying trays up to Peter Dennis.
How long ago.
Grace looked at her, and read her mind. She laughed.
‘What a great fuss, wasn’t it? Poor Captain Dennis.’ She gave Clio the hot drink, and then hunted in the dresser cupboard. She found a bottle of brandy and poured some into two glasses.
She settled herself at the table next to Clio. ‘You had better tell me,’ Grace said.
She listened, saying nothing. And then at the end she took Clio’s hands between her own. She rubbed them, looking down at the blue veins and sinews under the thin skin.
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Clio. What are you going to do?’
‘I can’t go back.’
‘Stay here with me.’
‘Not just tonight, I don’t mean that. I can’t ever go back. I feel as if everything ended today. Have you ever had that feeling?’
‘When Anthony died.’
Clio bent her head. Their clasped hands lay on her knees. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered in her turn.
‘Don’t be. I can tell you this, everything hasn’t ended. That’s the bloody point. It goes on, and you have to find a way to manage it. It’s the going on, day after day, when it should all have ended, when the lining of your skull and the soles of your feet and your bruised skin all tell you it should have finished for you, that is what is really difficult. But you have to do something just because you are alive.’
‘Is that how you felt?’
‘More or less.’
‘But you went off and got yourself elected to Parliament.’
‘Yes, I did.’
Clio looked at her. There was Grace’s strength, defined and incomprehensible. She had allowed Clio a brief insight into her grief, and she had felt it under her own skin and in her skull so that Grace had almost become one of the company of women. But then she had shifted her position and the chink had closed, and Grace was apart again. I wish we were closer, Clio thought. I wish we could ever have been close to each other.
‘What will you do?’ Grace asked.
I can’t become an MP. I can’t go back to Fathom, or my own home, or to Oxford …
Hectically, feeling Grace’s eyes on her, she began to improvise. ‘I’m going to go away. Right away, from London and everywhere else I know. There are all these paths I’ve been treading, round and round, for so long. I’m going to walk clear away from them.’
‘And so where will you go?’
Don’t press me. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. ‘Abroad, probably. I speak French and German. I’ve never been anywhere, much. I don’t have any money, now I come to think of it, so it will have to be done on a shoestring, not the Grand Tour or anything like that …’ An immensity of problems seemed to crowd in on her. Where to go, how to convey herself through the maze of ticket halls and cheap hotels and restaurants? She felt her weakness like an affliction.
Grace said coolly, ‘You own your flat, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sell it. You don’t want to leave it for him to live in, do you? You can borrow some money against it in the meantime.’
‘I could do that.’ A step, appearing as if the tide ebbed against a flight of steps in a sea-wall to reveal first the shiny ledge, suggesting the others still submerged.
‘I have an idea,’ Grace said.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m going to Germany soon, on a political visit, to Munich and Berlin. I want to see this Volkwerdung with my own eyes.’
‘Volkwerdung,’ Clio repeated, giving it the correct pronunciation. ‘Awakening of the people.’
Grace laughed merrily. ‘Come with me. Come and be my interpreter. Just for two weeks, it can be a holiday. We can see Julius in Berlin.’
Miraculously, another step appeared from the sea. It was slippery and shrouded in weed, but it was still a step.
‘I despise fascism,’ Clio said stiffly, ‘and all that Hitler stands for.’
‘How can you despise what you have never seen?’
‘But I would so much like to see Julius.’ It came to her that she wanted her twin more than anything or anyone in the world.
‘Come, then. It’s quite simple.’
‘Shall I?’
Grace unclasped their hands and held out her right, palm sideways. ‘Shake on it?’
The old formula of schoolroom pacts, often broken.
‘All right then, I will.’
They shook hands, solemnly.