London, 1936
The route of the march led along Oxford Street towards Hyde Park. At Hyde Park Corner, the Leader would address the crowd. Alice marched with her head up, swinging her arms to the rhythm of the pounding feet.
Behind the big plate-glass windows they passed were bright displays of summer fashions, but Alice didn’t even glance at them. When she did turn her head a little to one side it was to see if she could catch a glimpse of her own reflection in the shimmering glass. But mostly she stared straight in front of her, at the Union flag and the lightning-flash BUF banners proudly floating at the head of the march. Mosley was there, heading the column, and her thoughts were fixed on him.
She let herself be carried along by the singing and the chanting. The patriotic songs seemed to enter right into her soul, burning her with images of freedom and England. It was no effort to keep on marching, even though they had already come a long way. She was buoyed up by excitement, and her feet seemed to float over the hard road.
Alice loved marches and meetings. She attended them all, or as many as her work for Grace allowed her to. These fascist gatherings were like sharp peaks sticking up out of the monotonous plain of her life. They gave meaning and perspective to what was otherwise dull, and monotonous, and puzzling.
The ordinary business of life did puzzle her. Alice suspected that she was not quite like other girls. She was not like Tabby or Phoebe, for instance, and certainly nothing like the daughters of her parents’ friends with whom she had come out, who were interested in nothing but potential husbands and dances and clothes. Alice was interested in her Cause, and she pursued it with greedy anxiety. Because if she did not have that, she thought, what else would there be?
Very occasionally, with a kind of numb and clumsy regret, Alice would feel that it might perhaps be more comfortable after all to be like the other girls. It might be pleasant to have a suitor, and then maybe a wedding, and children and a home of her own. But then at once she would feel guilty, as if she had betrayed the beloved cause and the Leader himself. She would take down her photographs, or her party handbooks, and fix her attention on those.
And on days like today, then she had no doubts at all. It was glorious to be here, marching, and she felt sorry for anyone who was not.
They came to Oxford Circus, and streamed through the channel that the police created for them. There were shouting and fist-waving protesters behind the shoulders of the police, but Alice was used to that. One of the policemen walking on the flank of the march was keeping pace with her, she noticed. He kept looking at her. He had a very young, pink face under his helmet. She looked ahead, resolutely denying his attention.
At last they came to Hyde Park Corner. The marchers flowed into the park and surrounded a flag-draped podium. Alice dodged and squirmed her way forward, closer and closer to the edge of the platform until she was standing almost directly beneath it. The hecklers had closed in too, and the chanting began to rise between the two factions. The antifascists called their taunts:
Hitler and Mosley, what are they for?
Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war!
and the supporters in response, set up a drowning roar, ‘Mosley, Mosley!’ Alice crooned the Leader’s name, her eyes closed and her arm raised in the fascist salute. She forgot the policeman, and everything else except what was happening on the platform.
Mosley climbed up the steps ready to speak. He came closer to the microphone until his mouth almost touched it. There was a sigh from the crowd, like a gust of wind rolling through the trees.
His subject was peace, and the terrible threat of war, and the Jews.
‘We do not attack Jews on racial or religious grounds. We take up the challenge that they have thrown down, because they fight against fascism, and against Britain. They have striven for the past eighteen months to arouse in this country the feelings and passions of war with a nation with whom we made peace in 1918. … We fought Germany once in our British quarrel. We shall not fight Germany again in a Jewish quarrel!’
The cheering was like a storm now. The heckling was all but obliterated by it.
Alice cheered with the others. It took only a small effort of will, she knew from experience, to focus very closely on the words as they boomed over her head.
There must be no war, of course.
It was unthinkable that there could be a war with Hitler’s Germany.
It was the organized power of the Jews that was striving for war policies. It was not Nathaniel who was guilty, of course, nor anyone like him. Alice almost smiled at the idea. Nathaniel went quietly on in Oxford, teaching his linguistics to lumpy undergraduates, as he had always done.
But there was a sinister force, separate from her family and the people she knew. It was the weapon of financiers and bankers and industrialists, all of them Jews. It was unseen but no less threatening for that, and it was working against British order and equality and opportunity. It was this force that must be opposed, before it was too late.
This was what Alice knew.
The speeches went on. Alice felt dizzy with exhilaration as she listened and cheered and pressed closer forward.
And then when it was over, when she was right up against the edge of the podium, there was more triumphant singing and chanting. ‘Britons fight for Britain only! Britons fight!’
She craned her neck up to see the polished boots and black trouserlegs of the men on the platform, and their torsos foreshortened by the awkward angle of her head. She felt that they were superior beings, poised so far above her. It would have made her angry, if she had had the strength for it. But she was tired now, and her throat ached.
Then someone came forward and stooped down to her level. She saw his dark moustache and bright eyes.
‘Alice, what are you doing down there, all on your own?’
It was Mosley himself. He reached out one hand and took hold of her wrist, and at the same time one of his lieutenants caught her other arm. They swung her up, so that she hung in the air for an instant with the crowd pressing behind and beneath her, and then her feet found the boards of the platform and she stood upright, and the Leader steadied her with an arm around her shoulder.
The view was wonderful, a sudden panorama of upturned faces and bobbing hats and waving hands, and she could see the ribbon of police uniforms at the edge of the crowd, the brown shiny flanks of the police horses, and the protesters excluded beyond them.
There was a ragged, ironic cheer. Alice lifted her hand and grinned, shyly, like a child unexpectedly noticed by the adults.
‘What would Grace say?’ Tom Mosley was asking her. He was laughing but she could see that he was concerned.
‘She knows I’m here, really she does,’ Alice earnestly promised.
‘Are you sure?’ He was teasing now, and it made her feel awkward, but at the same time pleased and excited.
Behind them the crowds were beginning to disperse. Some of the marchers were forming up into ragged columns, still contained by the dark blue markers of police uniforms, and the singing and shouting had become vague and fractured, without the antiphonal chorusing of before the meeting. On the fringes, away from the platform, there were scuffling fights and some stone-throwing.
‘Are you going back to Vincent Street now?’
Alice nodded, touched with the invariable feeling of anticlimax that came after meetings.
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said.
Her face bloomed her delight at him.
‘I thought I’d drop in to see Grace,’ Mosley said, when they were ensconced in his car. Alice sank back in the passenger seat of the Bentley, admiring it and the panache of his driving. They seemed to skim along twice as fast as the rest of the mundane traffic in Park Lane.
‘She might be at the House,’ Alice ventured, knowing perfectly well that she was. Cressida would be at school. There was no one at Vincent Street except Nanny and the servants. She held her breath, and her wish was granted.
‘Oh, I’ll look in anyway,’ he said.
The house was empty and very quiet. They went up to sit in Grace’s creamy drawing room. The Leader seemed perfectly at home there. He leant back against the sofa cushions, crossing one leg over the other, watching Alice with his bright, penetrating stare.
‘Would you like some tea? Or a cocktail?’ She found that she didn’t know what time it was. The day had slipped into a different perspective that did not seem to be governed by the usual rules and dimensions.
‘A drink, perhaps.’
She went to the tray and clinked about among the bottles and glasses. Her fingers were trembling, she noticed. When she handed the glass he touched the cushions beside him.
‘Sit down here, Alice.’
She sat, and it was as if her arm and the shoulder nearest to him lost a protective layer of skin. The flesh prickled and burnt with his proximity.
‘You’re a faithful girl, aren’t you, with your work at headquarters and attendance at all the rallies?’
‘Thank you,’ she said, not knowing what else to say.
He studied her for a moment. Alice held his eyes.
‘Wouldn’t you like your work to be acknowledged with some more … official position, with the Women’s Section?’
‘No,’ Alice said fiercely. ‘No, I’m quite happy just doing what I do.’
Alice had no desire to be promoted by relegation to the women’s ranks, to type envelopes away from the heady atmosphere and uniforms of the King’s Road. She drank her cocktail, without noticing the taste, and stood up to mix them both another.
The familiar room as well as the ordinary rules of time seemed to dissolve around her. The walls and the ceiling were a long way off, but the cream-on-cream figured patterning of the sofa cover was close, intensely vivid and important, as if it were an extension of her sensitized skin. She rubbed the tips of her fingers over it as they sat talking and sipping their drinks. Alice supposed that she had dreamed this scene so often that now it was really happening it seemed more dream than reality.
‘I’m sorry Grace isn’t here,’ she said at last. She was afraid that Cressida might come in, or that he would say he really must leave now, but the Leader showed no inclination to move.
‘Are you?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows.
‘Not really,’ she whispered. Her throat and the tight patches of skin over her cheekbones suddenly burnt with colour.
He took her hand, very lightly, and turned it over in his own. He examined her ringless fingers and the blue veins under the transparent skin at her wrist.
‘And so what are you going to do with yourself, little Alice?’
The question stung her. It sounded like a tolerant adult asking a small girl about her plans for a summer’s day.
‘I’m not a child,’ Alice said.
‘Of course you are not.’ He held on to her hand.
Looking at her, Mosley saw that she was right. She was a little goose, but not an innocent one. There was an intensity of concentration in her face now that made her look almost cross-eyed. Her mouth hung slightly open, and there were tiny beads of perspiration on her upper lip. She was not pretty exactly, but there was a coiled spring of energy in her that he found momentarily intriguing. He leant forward, still holding her hand, and touched his mouth to hers.
Her fingers flexed and hooked on to his. When he lifted his head he saw that she was panting slightly. He smiled at her, a famous crooked smile.
‘Well,’ he murmured, in apparent regret, with the intention of disentangling himself. He was still close enough to notice that there were amber flecks in her dark eyes.
Alice did not blush, or look modestly down into her own lap, or lean back against the cushions and begin knowingly to talk about something else. She held herself quite still for a second, fixing him with her wide-set stare that now seemed touched with craziness. Then, in a single fluid movement, she drew closer, and opened her mouth against his.
Her tongue was hot, darting in his mouth. The wild springiness of her hair around them seemed to give off sparks of electricity. There was a moment when they leant together, and when he might have pressed forward to taste more of her. Her short, ragged breaths sounded unnaturally loud to both of them. Her hands reached convulsively to hold on to him, twisting on the sleeves of his coat. There was a close, singed smell about her skin.
He drew back from her then. It did not take a great effort to remember that this was Lady Grace’s drawing room, and this girl was her puppyish cousin. He began to regret his moment of flirtatiousness.
‘Forgive me for that,’ Mosley whispered. He could make his eyes twinkle roguishly, and he did so now.
Alice did not relax her grip on his arms.
He slid forward, preparing to stand up, and her grasp tightened.
‘Alice, you must let me go.’
‘No,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘I can’t do that.’
‘Alice …’ He was still gentle. He was uncomfortable now, but there was also something fascinating and definitely flattering in this urgency of hers. For a brief instant he toyed with the idea. She would have strong white hips and a broad bottom, and her sparky hair would fall over his face when she leant above him. But he dismissed the thought almost as soon as it came to him.
‘You mustn’t be so wicked,’ he told her, with an attempt at playfulness.
‘It isn’t wicked.’
‘What is it, then?’ If he teased her a little, a properly light atmosphere might still be regained.
She was solemn, almost rapt. Her mouth was shiny and he could see the glint of wetness inside it. He realized that there was something dislocated about Alice Hirsh. Her eyes were opaque, and the minutely unfocused glare of them alarmed him.
She whispered, ‘It is good and natural. And wonderful, as well. And I have been waiting, waiting for such a long time.’
She was going to seize him again, he realized. She was breathing in the same short, audible gasps. He glanced at the door, firmly closed, and at the cushions and covers and knickknacks of Grace’s drawing room.
‘You don’t mean any of this,’ he told her. Very firmly he put her hands back to rest in her lap.
She smiled, drawing back her lips to show her teeth and a crescent of pink gum above them. The smile made her look unhappier than she had done since their tête-à-tête began.
‘How can you know what I think or feel? I know about you, yes, I do, but you know nothing of me. Look.’
She reached up and undid the top button of her black shirt. He saw the white skin below her flushed neck, and then when more buttons were undone a strip of wholesome plain underclothing, and the tops of her breasts above it.
It was time to leave, and if Alice was determined not to allow it he would go without smoothing out this awkward wrinkle.
‘You are very fresh and lovely, Alice, and you flatter a man who is far too old and tired for you. But I’m afraid I’m not what you think, or really want, you know.’
He was being very patient and gentle with her, more so than she deserved, but she seemed not to recognize it. She went on sitting, with her clothes half undone, watching him as if she was preparing to pounce.
‘Thank you for the cocktail, Alice, dear. Will you give my regards to Grace?’
He stood up, and as he straightened his coat he saw that this lopsided girl was not interested in gestures, or the polite formulae that existed between men and women, or in saving her own face. At the same instant he remembered back to when he had first met her, at some party of Grace’s. Had it been in this very room? She had always stared at him, following him with her eyes wherever he moved. She was not unique in that; women were often affected by him. But there was this difference in Alice Hirsh. It came to him that it was desperation.
He said goodbye, politely but without offering any opportunity for contradiction.
Alice jumped to her feet. It was now, she thought, now with everything she had to give, or never again. Her heart was pounding arhythmically, knocking at her ribs so hard that she was afraid that she might choke. All the breath seemed squeezed out of her, to be replaced by suffocating clouds of heat that burnt her lungs.
‘No,’ she whispered, somehow finding the oxygen to form the word.
But he was going, just the same. He was very tall and upright; she could see the groove at the nape of his neck, and the dark and surprisingly soft fur of his moustache as he half turned.
‘Please.’
Alice half fell and half knelt in front of him. Her fists clenched on the hem of his coat and she looked imploringly up at him. It didn’t matter, she thought with a split-second’s flare of exultation. It didn’t matter; it was now or not at all, something was happening to her at last. She smiled again, showing her teeth and pink gums.
Mosley hesitated, with the girl’s hands locked on him. He was afraid that she would make him drag her. Her disordered clothes seemed to spill flesh over him.
‘Get up,’ he ordered coldly.
Alice’s face had suddenly turned puffy and vacant. Her eyes didn’t fix on him longer. She whispered, ‘But I love you. You and the party are the only things I care about in the world.’
As she spoke, and with huge relief, he recognized that he would not have to prise her off him.
She was shrinking, away from him and down into a small huddle on the white rug. Her hands fell loosely, palms open, in a gesture of defeat.
Alice had given up, almost as soon as she had recklessly offered herself to him, as if she had no high opinion of her own value, and therefore no real expectation that he would appreciate her either. She had tried, and was not surprised to fail. The pathos of that brushed him lightly, but his relief was far stronger. He glanced down at her bowed head, noticing the whiteness of her scalp along the line of her parting.
‘Good girl,’ he said more kindly. ‘There must be plenty of things for you to care about, you know, if you did but look out for them. Now, listen to me. After I’ve gone, go and wash your face and brush your hair, and no one will be any the wiser.’
He stopped at the door, holding the knob in his hand, and looked back at her. Alice was still crouching in the middle of the rug, her face hidden under her tumbled hair.
‘That’s a good girl,’ he repeated, before he went out. He thought that he had struck the right note of friendliness and detachment.
The Leader went down the stairs and retrieved his hat from the hallstand. A pile of letters neatly stacked on a silver tray waited for Grace. The house was still quiet. He opened the front door and closed it behind him firmly.
Alice stayed where he had left her for what seemed quite a long time. Her muscles grew stiff in the unnatural posture, but she didn’t raise her head or unclench her fingers. No one came. It became obvious as the long minutes passed that no one was going to come. He must be back in the King’s Road by now. Did they laugh at her there, she wondered, all the young men?
At last she looked up. Her neck and her head were stabbed with needles of pain. She saw their two empty cocktail glasses on the table beside the sofa arm, and the mussed cushions.
This was not, then, some trick of her imagination. She had done what she remembered doing.
She pushed her hair back from her face. Very slowly, reaching out one hand to steady herself in case she fell, she stood upright. The dimensions of the room were still all wrong. The walls were too far away, and the floor rose up against the soles of her feet, ready to tilt and unbalance her.
Alice felt a pressure inside her. She didn’t know if it was caused by the swelling up of tears or screams, but she was afraid that some membrane would rupture and let whatever it was spill out of her. She concentrated very hard on containing the pressure in some deep recess. Her jaw and her fists tightened with the effort of it.
No one must know anything else. Not after this afternoon. Was it still afternoon, or was it evening now?
She bent down and plumped up the cushions, one by one. Then she placed the cocktail glasses neatly on the tray. The familiar actions seemed utterly bizarre counterposed with the images in her head. She kept seeing herself as if she were watching someone else, someone she ought to feel very sorry for. This person was leaning forward to kiss a handsome man who did not want to be kissed. She was kneeling down clinging on to the man’s coat. She was unbuttoning her clothes.
Alice looked down and saw that her black shirt was undone.
Her hand came up to her mouth and she bit hard into the soft heel of it.
Upstairs. She must go upstairs and hide herself.
She reached her bedroom, somehow, and bolted the door behind her. The photographs in pride of place on the shelf above her bed stared down.
Alice sat down on her bed. The immediate world seemed to be under her control again. This room did not bulge threateningly out of shape, and she could see from the little travelling clock in its case on her bedside table that it was twenty minutes past six in the evening. But she had begun to shiver now, and her teeth chattered. The return to normality only threw the enormity of what had happened into sharper relief. The swamp of humiliation and shame rose up around her.
She could never see the Leader again. She looked up at his picture, and then saw herself in the drawing room downstairs. Alice’s knuckles knocked against her teeth with her shudders.
She could never have any more to do with the party, and it had been the centre of her grown-up life. She could hear the snickering laughter, and see the smothered grins and the gleeful nudges. They would know, somehow, all of them.
She put her head in her hands. The pressure was growing stronger inside her. Alice realized that she was afraid of what might happen. She was afraid of being alone, and afraid of being pitied, and most of all afraid of herself.
The idea of oblivion came to her like a gift.
As soon as she had assimilated the idea Alice stood up, without allowing herself time to think.
She unbolted her door and slipped along the corridor to Grace’s bedroom. There was a faint aura of her perfume in here, and the tiny sounds of the house were muffled by thick carpets and heavy curtains. The white quilted satin of the bedcover shimmered in the dim light.
Alice crossed to the bathroom door. She clicked the string that hung beside it and blinked in the sudden glare of the yellow electric light. This was a place of receding reflections and ranks of glittering glass bottles. There was a mirror with a curved top over the marble washstand, and Alice knew that there was a cupboard let into the wall behind this mirror.
She touched the latch and the mirror door swung open. Inside there were narrow glass shelves with more bottles and jars ranged neatly upon them. Some of the bottles contained medicine. Alice knew which they were; sometimes she collected prescriptions for Grace from her doctor’s receptionist.
She found what she was looking for. It was a small brown vial. She pushed it deep into her pocket and closed the door of the cabinet with a final click.
Down the corridor again in the much smaller and more functional bathroom that she shared with Cressida, Alice filled a toothglass with water. Then she went back into her own bedroom and bolted the door. She tipped the contents of Grace’s medicine vial into the palm of her hand and discarded the empty bottle.
Alice put out her tongue. She licked up the first of the small white tablets. The taste was powdery and then bitter. She took a mouthful of water and swallowed the pill.
Soon there was a rhythm. Tongue, bitter taste, sip and swallow.
In a few moments the hollow of her hand was empty except for a trace of whitish dust.
The cocktails had made her thirsty. Frowning now, Alice drank the last of the water from the toothglass. She took the photographs down from her shelf and put them on the floor opposite the bed, propped up against the wall so that she could look at them. Then she let herself fall sideways, to lie down on top of the wrinkled bedcover. She drew her knees up to her chest, and eventually closed her eyes.
Cressida went upstairs at ten o’clock. Grace had been dining elsewhere, and so Cressida had eaten her meal down in the kitchen with Nanny.
‘Where’s Miss Alice?’ Nanny had asked over the shepherd’s pie.
‘At one of her meetings, I expect,’ Cressida answered, without much thought. Nanny sniffed and took another mouthful.
On her way up to bed, however, Cressida did begin to think. It was not like Alice to miss a meal. And if she had been invited to some fascist feast or gathering she would have been eager to announce it.
She went along to Alice’s door and knocked sharply.
‘Alice?’
There was no answer, and she had not expected one. Cressida dropped down on one knee and peered through the keyhole of the solid old door. There was no key in the lock, it must have been lost long ago, Cressida knew that perfectly well. It was not the first time she had spied on Alice.
She could see the bed, and the black hump of Alice lying curled up on it. She was wearing her stupid uniform.
‘Alice?’ Cressida pounded on the door with the flat of her hand.
‘Alice, for goodness’ sake.’
Cressida peered through the little hole again. Alice had not even stirred.
‘God,’ she whispered to herself. She straightened up, knowing – without the smallest faltering hope of anything else – that a terrible thing had happened.
She twisted the handle sharply but the door would not open. She leant against it and pushed, and it still held. Then Cressida stood back, gathered herself, and launched her shoulder with her full weight behind it against the door panel.
The door was solid enough, but the little bolt that Alice had bought was flimsy. She had impatiently screwed it in place with the socket against the moulded frame, and the screws had never bitten properly into the old wood. The bolt sprang out now and wrenched the socket away with it. Cressida catapulted into the room and caught herself against the bureau. A photograph of Adolf Hitler slithered under her feet and the toe-cap of her school lace-up shoe clinked against something else that had fallen to the floor.
Cressida bent down beside the bed and shook Alice by the shoulder. Then she bent closer to look at her face.
Alice’s eyelids were blue, and they seemed to have sunk into her head. Her mouth was open and there were bluish marks around her lips. She was breathing slowly and thickly.
Cressida’s hand was still gripping her shoulder. The futility of this rough, friendly attempt at awakening struck her at once. Alice’s body felt heavy and solid, but Alice herself within it seemed to be removed, at some great distance. Cressida withdrew her hand, looking down at Alice’s face.
A refrain started to pulse in her head. Oh, God. Oh, God.
She found a way to scramble to her feet. There was another photograph there, on the floor, but she didn’t stop to glance at it. She lurched to the door and gripped the frame with one hand.
‘Nanny,’ she screamed into the corridor. ‘Nanny, please come. Oh, please, come now.’
Nathaniel and Eleanor reached the Westminster Hospital in the early hours of the morning. Grace was there, sitting on an uncomfortable chair in a little waiting room, smoking and staring at the shiny tiled walls. A junior nurse had brought her a cup of thick tea with a biscuit laid in the saucer, gazing in awe at Grace’s dress and shoes before scuttling away again.
‘Where is she?’ Eleanor demanded. ‘I want to see her.’
Nathaniel put his hand on her arm.
Grace’s telephone call had woken them both. They went to bed early nowadays, after the news on the wireless. They had dressed with desperate speed in the big, dark house and had driven straight to London. To Grace her uncle and aunt looked smaller and older than she remembered, with the marks of bewildered anxiety in their faces clear in the over-bright hospital lights.
‘She will be quite all right,’ Grace said at once. She had told them as much on the telephone. The doctor had been quite definite about it. ‘There weren’t enough pills left in the bottle to do any real damage.’
‘Where is she?’ Eleanor repeated.
‘Next door.’
Alice was lying on her back with her arms stretched out on the white sheet. Her eyes were closed. A middle-aged nurse in a complicated starched cap was sitting with her.
‘Professor and Mrs Hirsh?’
‘Yes,’ Nathaniel said. Eleanor ran to the side of the bed.
‘She is asleep now. I am afraid we had to pump out her stomach. Doctor explained it all to Lady Grace.’
Eleanor looked up. She was holding one of Alice’s limp hands. ‘I am her mother. I would like to see the doctor, please.’ The young doctor was found. He told them only what they already knew – that the dose had not been large enough to threaten Alice’s life, that she would make a full recovery within a few days.
‘Thank you,’ Nathaniel said. ‘That is a great relief.’
‘Have you any idea why she might have wanted to take her own life?’ the doctor asked gently.
Eleanor looked straight into his face. ‘No. We cannot think of any reason at all. Alice is a normal, happy, healthy young woman.’
‘I see,’ the doctor said.
They left Alice under the nurse’s eye and went back to the waiting room. Grace was still sitting, smoking yet another cigarette. Nathaniel put his big hand on her shoulder.
‘Thank you for doing what you did, Grace. Your aunt and I are very grateful.’
Grace suddenly felt very tired. She had been waiting in the airless room for hours. She knew that Alice, the last-born, had always been Nathaniel’s favourite child, and his simple thanks touched her with unexpected force. She looked down at her handbag and gloves, wondering for a moment if she might be going to cry. It would be an inappropriate weakness, she thought.
Eleanor turned on them, as Nathaniel stood at Grace’s side. Her face looked bruised with her anxiety, but the concern was overlaid with a harder glaze of suspicion and resentment.
‘Why did she do this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Grace answered truthfully. Alice had seemed content enough, between her secretarial duties and her political enthusiasms.
Eleanor said, ‘She is unhappy. It isn’t natural, I do know that. All these ideas she has learnt.’ From you, they all knew that was what she meant. ‘Anti-Semitic poison, bigotry, racism. It isn’t what we taught her.’
Grace regarded her steadily, but said nothing. She did not want to embark on a political argument with Aunt Eleanor in a hospital waiting room at five o’clock in the morning.
‘It isn’t natural,’ Eleanor repeated. She suddenly sounded helpless, rather than aggressive. Her back had always been straight but now her spine seemed to curve, diminishing her.
‘What is natural?’ Grace whispered.
At once, Eleanor stiffened again. ‘To do what we have brought her up for. To marry some decent man, to have children, to be a wife and mother.’
And yet none of Eleanor’s daughters had achieved as much. Grace thought fleetingly of Clio, in Paris with Rafael and her illegitimate baby. And of spinsterly Tabby, with her school and church.
‘That is not the choice of every woman,’ Grace said. ‘And Alice is an adult, capable of her own decisions. We should be grateful that women’s lives are no longer as circumscribed as they were when my mother and you were young.’
Eleanor’s mouth made a hard line that was at odds with the tired folds and curves of her face. ‘You may be grateful, but I am not.’
Nathaniel put his arms around his wife. He held her head against his chest and stroked her hair.
‘Alice will be all right,’ he said. ‘You will see. There will be a husband and babies, all in good time.’
Grace regarded him as he stood holding Eleanor. He was a big, warm man filled with love and affection. But there was also a fatal softness in the core of him, a flaw that had been transmitted to all his children.
She bent down slowly, with aching limbs, and picked up her bag and gloves. She eased the supple glove leather over her fingers and smoothed it over her wrists.
‘I think I will go home now,’ Grace told them. ‘I have a busy day tomorrow. Today, that is. Uncle Nathaniel is right, Aunt Eleanor, you know.’
‘I pray as much,’ Eleanor said, without looking at her.
Cressida had been to bed, and had even slept, but she was up again by the time Grace reached home. She was sitting at the kitchen table in her woollen plaid dressing gown. Her face was pale and there were dark patches under her eyes.
‘Is she all right?’
‘Yes, quite all right,’ Grace sighed. She would have liked China tea, after the brown hospital brew, but it was too much trouble to make it. The sight of Cressida with her unbrushed hair and white cheeks was obscurely irritating.
‘Why did she do it?’
‘The doctor told me it was a way of saying, “Pay attention to me. Look at me.”’
‘Do you think that is true?’
Grace picked up an orange and began to peel it. Cressida watched how neatly she stripped off the peel and white pith and laid the segments in a crescent on a china plate.
‘It could be. Who knows, with Alice? Uncle Nathaniel and Aunt Eleanor are with her now.’
‘Will they take her back to Oxford, when she is better?’
‘I suppose so. Cressida, why are you sitting there like that? At least brush your hair, couldn’t you?’
Grace picked up her plate, and a glass of prune juice. She was going upstairs for a hot bath, before the day began. Cressida watched her until the door closed behind her.
Look at me, listen to me, Cressida thought.
In the evening, Jake came to the hospital. He found Eleanor close beside Alice’s bed, and Alice herself awake, her hair brushed and coiled to frame her white face. Nathaniel was sitting heavily in the corner of the room with an unopened newspaper beside him. Eleanor and Nathaniel looked expectantly at Jake, as if with his knowledge of bones and blood he could diagnose his sister’s ailment.
‘Poor Alice,’ Jake murmured. His helplessness presented itself to him more strongly than usual. He sat down on the high bed and held her wrist to count her pulse, and then angled her chin with his fingers so that he could look into her eyes.
Alice tried to turn her head aside. She felt the probing of their concern, glaring through her eyelids like a light that was too bright, and longed to be asleep again. The family was closing round her, pressing her up against the wall of her own failure.
All the time she had been lying in this bed, some of the time pretending to be asleep and for the remainder avoiding her parents’ painful optimism, she had been thinking.
She could not go back to yesterday, that was impossible. The thought of it made her want to roll away, wadding up the shame and horror inside her.
But she had no idea which way to go forward. Perhaps, she thought, there never was any going forward. It was quite possible that life just went on and on, as messy and flaccid and unformulated as it was now. One needed the party to give all of it some meaning and after what she had done, how could there be any more party?
Yet Alice was sure of one thing. She had not wanted to die, she had only wanted to live differently. It was a relief to find herself alive, even in this little room. Even with Eleanor and Nathaniel bravely not admitting their sorrow and Jake with his doctorly bluff bedside behaviour. The family closed its ranks around her, protecting and containing, as it had always done. And still she was glad to be here.
She turned and met Jake’s scrutiny full in the face, with her old defiance.
‘Why did you take the pills?’
The temptation to tell him, barefaced, rippled through her. It was so unthinkable that she almost laughed, and then felt uneasy with the spectacle of her own amusement.
‘You must know why, Alice,’ Jake persisted. Nathaniel and Eleanor watched and waited.
‘I felt unhappy,’ she said at last. ‘I’m sorry. I’m better now.’
It was all she had said, and all she would say.
‘Poor Alice,’ he repeated. She noticed that there were creases in his cheeks that his full beard no longer hid. Jake would soon be forty. No longer a young man to whom anything might happen. Vaguely, she wondered what were the satisfactions that gave Jake his apparent endurance.
‘She will be quite all right,’ he was saying to Eleanor, just as the hospital doctor had done. ‘Rest is what she needs. Rest and a complete change of scene.’
‘She must come back home, of course,’ Eleanor said. ‘I can look after her there and she will be away, away from …’ Her voice trailed off but they knew she meant away from Grace.
Alice’s expression did not change.
‘Would you like that?’ Jake asked her gently.
‘To be like Tabby?’ Alice asked.
There was a little silence. Nathaniel eased his bulk forward in his chair. His big hands hung between his knees.
‘Come for a little while. Keep your old father company through the Long Vac.’
The note he struck was wrong, they all heard it. He spoke to her as if she was the adored child, and not white-faced grown-up Alice in her hospital bed.
‘I think I am too old to come home,’ she answered flatly.
The pressure of their concern was in one way almost intolerable. She longed for them to go away, so that she could close her eyes again. But yet her effect on them gave her some sense of power to be used when she had so little strength elsewhere.
Now was the chance, she thought suddenly. Now was the time to seize an opportunity, whilst they were ready to concede to her. If only she could think of any concession that might be worth the winning.
‘I would like to go away somewhere,’ she announced.
Their faces brightened with the hope of it.
‘To see Julius, perhaps. Would he have me for a houseguest, d’you think?’
To Berlin.
No.
Eleanor snatched at her hand.
‘You cannot go to Berlin. It is far too dangerous. I only wish that Julius would have the sense to come home.’
Alice, why do you want to hurt us?
They were frightened of Nazism, which was so strong and simple and obvious. Alice lay against her pillows as the protests and reasonings and love washed up against her. She felt cut off from them now, family and feelings, within the walls of her own self-interest.
‘To Clio then, in Paris.’
No.
But the reasons were different now, and the protests only came from Eleanor.
Clio was living with a man who was not her husband, and an illegitimate baby; living on little money and what they could scrape from hand-to-mouth jobs; Clio had set herself apart from their world.
‘But Clio is very happy.’
It was Jake who said it.
Clio wrote to them all very often, long and affectionate letters that described the apartment in the Marais that she had taken with Rafael and Romy, her writing and the peculiar jobs that she and Rafael took on when money was short, the friends they had made and the city she had grown to love. There were photographs of the tow-haired baby girl, and of Rafael in the park at Versailles, and of herself with a new, shorter hairstyle. These pictures had taken their place, without comment being made, in the family photograph albums.
But Clio had never come home again, and the letters that Eleanor wrote in acknowledgement were short and formal.
‘Don’t you think that happiness is a good influence?’ Jake persisted.
Eleanor bent her head.
‘I think we should let Alice go to Paris to have a holiday with her sister, if that is what she wants,’ Nathaniel said.
When Eleanor would not look at him he picked her hand off the laundered-thin hospital bedcover and held it between his own. He thought of all the times he had done this, and the progress of the years, and the baby that Alice had once been.
‘She can see our granddaughter for us,’ he said.
Eleanor had begun to cry. She would not raise her head but she answered, ‘If you say Alice may go, who am I to say that she may not?’
The apartment in the Marais had only three rooms and a tiny kitchen with a cubicle containing a sit-up bath leading off it. There were interesting views of narrow streets and tall, twisted buildings from the windows, and Clio grew a few flowers in terracotta pots inside the tiny balconies. Grete had packed up some of Rafael’s books together with her paintings of Waltersroda and sent them from Berlin. Rafael put up shelves for the books, and hung the pictures. He acquired some carpentry tools of his own and made Romy’s rocking cradle, and then a neat little desk-table that held Clio’s typewriter.
Clio loved to watch him work. He was deft with his hands, and the logical progression from raw wood to stained and varnished furniture was infinitely pleasing. The rooms were slowly furnished, and became home.
Rafael could not practise the law in France, but he was sometimes able to find legal clerical work, and they both did translations for an academic publisher. They lived on whatever they could earn and on the remains of Clio’s Holborough inheritance, and when that was not enough Rafael worked as a porter at Les Halles. Sometimes Clio sold an article to Geoffrey Dawson or to one of the other newspaper editors, and she also began to write short stories. Two or three of these were published in Fathom, although Max Erdmann begrudged paying her the minuscule fee.
‘You are family,’ he protested.
Clio retorted in turn, ‘You would not want family to starve to death, Max, would you?’
Sometimes, in the quiet evenings, she took out the manuscript of her Berlin diary and worked on that.
After Romy was born, they divided the responsibility for her care between them. She was a placid baby who cried only rarely. As soon as she was old enough there were simple family expeditions to Versailles and Compiègne, and one wonderful summer holiday on the Breton coast.
Their anxieties were for the condition of Germany, and the threat of war when the Nazis entered the Rhineland.
Grete and Julius were still in Berlin and Rafael’s father was growing older and weaker in his house at the edge of the Thüringer Forest, and Rafael was often made impatient by his enforced exile. Clio learnt to recognize his darker moods, and to sympathize with his fear that he had slipped away from oppression and left others behind to suffer it.
But even so, Clio was to look back on these threadbare Paris years and the beginning of motherhood as the happiest time of her life.
When Nathaniel’s letter briefly explaining what had happened reached them, Clio agreed at once that Alice must come to Paris. They made space for her by moving Romy’s small bed into their own room, and on one sunny Sunday morning they went to the Gare du Nord to meet the boat train.
Alice held her single small suitcase in her hand and looked down from the high steps of the third-class carriage. She was almost the last person to leave the crowded train. Down at the end of the platform she saw Clio, bareheaded in a blue and white cotton summer dress, holding a plump toddler up in her arms. There was a big, blond-haired man beside her. Porter’s work had thickened Rafael’s muscles, making him look burlier than he once had done. They looked like a happy family.
Clio saw Alice at the same moment. She was struck by the change in her. Her broad face was blank, as if it had been wiped with a cloth, except for the dark hollows of her eyes. As they advanced to meet each other Clio was reminded of how Nanny used to dab the baby Alice’s face with a sponge, after nursery tea, long after the rest of them had grown old enough to use their napkins.
Alice was wearing a black shirt and her British Union of Fascists badge. The last group of passengers looked curiously at her.
‘Alice, darling,’ Clio called, and held open her arms.
Alice hesitated, and then glanced around to each side of her as if she was calculating which effect to aim for. Then she lifted her arm in a salute.
‘Heil Hitler,’ she said.
When Rafael held out his hand to shake hers she took it only after a small hesitation, and released it again at once.
They did their best to welcome Alice to Paris. On that first Sunday afternoon, the four of them walked along the quais. Romy ran ahead in little bursts, negotiating the uneven cobbles with her hands stretched out in front of her, and then peered back over her shoulder to make sure that her parents were still close by. Strolling French families in good Sunday clothes passed by them, some of them smiling their admiration of the little girl’s mass of fair curls.
‘Bateaux-boats,’ Romy called, pointing to the river barges. Her first language was an engaging trilingual mixture.
There were flower vendors beside the steps with wicker baskets full of blooms, and cages of tiny birds, and old men selling balloons and paper twists of coloured bonbons. Pavement artists made quick charcoal sketches and sold them for a few francs apiece. At one corner, near the Pont Neuf, they came to a little wooden kiosk offering newspapers and magazines.
Alice stopped, her attention caught by a newspaper photograph. While Clio and Rafael waited for her, holding on to Romy, she dug in her pocket and held out a handful of small coins to the kiosk man. As soon as the paper was in her hands she spread it out on the smooth stone coping of the river wall. Clio watched her puzzling out the words of the caption with her inadequate French.
‘What does it say?’ Clio asked at last.
Alice held out the paper. Clio saw a queer, nervous, glazed look in her eyes. Unwillingly, she looked down to see what it was that had captured her attention.
The photograph was of Hitler at the Olympia Stadium in Berlin. He was shown in profile, angrily leaving the tribune from which he had been watching the Games. The story beneath the picture announced that Jesse Owens, the black American athlete, had just won the two hundred metres and the crowd in the vast stadium had risen to salute him. Only the Führer had not stayed to honour his achievement.
Clio folded the paper again, and handed it back.
‘I think he is quite right,’ Alice said in a tight voice. And when Clio did not respond she added, ‘The Olympic Games should be a proud competition for the Aryan races. They should not be open to black mercenaries like Owens, or to Jews either. The Führer was quite right to leave the stadium.’
Clio looked down. The sun was still filtering through the branches of the plane trees and making irregular blots of light on the old cobbles. She saw her daughter’s face, turned upwards, and suddenly noticed that she looked like Grete under the baby curls. Rafael was standing a little to one side, seemingly watching the barges pass under the arches of the bridge.
‘I shall pretend that I didn’t hear what you said,’ Clio said.
‘I did say it.’
Clio was reminded of childhood arguments: I did so. No you did not. As the youngest Alice had often come off worst in those, except when Nathaniel intervened for her. With the thought came the sudden conviction that what was wrong with Alice was that she had failed to grow up. She was not a little girl any longer, but she had never fully metamorphosed into the twenty-four-year-old woman that her exterior presented to the world. She seemed unhappily frozen into adolescence.
Clio knew that her sister was unhappy. She could feel it seeping out of her. Whatever it was that had caused her to swallow Grace’s sleeping tablets in London was still with her, following Alice’s faltering tracks.
She made herself reach out and touch Alice’s arm, pushing through the prickle of dislike that she felt for her sister’s hostility to Rafael. She could ignore her politics, Clio thought, but not her rudeness to her lover. The arm was solid, almost resistant to her touch under the warm black stuff of her blouse.
‘I didn’t hear,’ she repeated. ‘Come on, let’s go home and have tea.’
They were difficult days.
Sometimes, Alice was like the child she had been in the Woodstock Road. She romped with Romy, rolling her over on the floor or on the bed until the child gasped with excitement, and then chased her the little length of the apartment until Romy hid behind a door or behind Clio’s legs, shouting in terrified delight, ‘Nein! Mummy, no!’
And then at another time Alice turned to Clio and said seriously, ‘You must be glad that she is so fair. At least she doesn’t look like a Jewess.’
‘Your own father is a Jew,’ Clio shouted.
Suddenly they found themselves squared up to each other, like fighting cats, ready to pounce. Clio was shaking so that she could hardly control herself but Alice was massively calm, even somnolent.
It was Rafael who put his hands on Clio’s shoulders and turned her away, sending her into their bedroom until she stopped shuddering with anger and her breath came more easily in her chest.
In bed at night, Clio lay against him. ‘I am sorry for what Alice says,’ she whispered. ‘I am ashamed.’
‘Don’t feel ashamed, and don’t be sorry except for Alice herself. What do you think has happened to her?’
At last, Clio answered, ‘Alice never had anything of her own, I suppose. All the acceptable attitudes had always been used up by the rest of us before she had a chance to try them out. This at least is her own. Except what she has learnt or copied from Grace. Alice always adored Grace, especially after she became an MP.’
Clio did not try to resist the notion that Alice’s attitudes were in some way the result of Grace’s influence.
A week went by. Alice seemed determined to test them by seeing how far she could go. At every opportunity she voiced hostility towards all things Jewish. Rafael was quiet and obviously troubled, but he remained outwardly friendly. It was Clio who found it increasingly difficult to be patient and tolerant when her sister was neither of those things. The current of her sympathy slowly dried up and drained away into the sands of disgust.
On the evening of the second Sunday, after Romy had been put to bed, there was a terrible argument.
They had been sitting over supper around the circular table in the window that looked down into the street. Clio made some meaningless remark about the charm of the old houses opposite to them, and Alice leant across to her with combative determination that seemed also touched with weariness. Perhaps at that moment even Alice was bored by the battle.
But she said, ‘French manners, French food, French views. Aren’t you proud at all to be British?’
Alice had eaten her share of the French pot au feu, Clio noted. She only answered, with a shrug, ‘Does it matter?’ London seemed a long way from these warm little rooms.
Alice would not let it go, now she had stirred herself up. She had lately taken to wearing a good deal of make-up and her cheeks began to burn under the sallow mask of it. Her bright red lipstick seemed to slip askew on her mouth.
‘Don’t you care about Britain?’
Clio regarded her coldly. ‘Not in the way that you and your fascist friends pretend to care. Britain will survive. I care far more about Rafael and Romy.’
Alice’s fist slammed on the table, making the plates and glasses ring.
‘There is no pretence. We are being led sideways towards a war with Germany by a conspiracy of Jews. We made peace with Germany in 1918 and the Führer is our friend.’
‘He is no friend of mine or Rafael, or of Julius or any of our friends in Germany. You have never been there, Alice. What do you know about the misery and the violence and the suffering caused by your precious Führer?’
Clio was shouting now, like Alice.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rafael with his head resting on one hand, the broad fingers splayed out in the hair at his temple. He was wearing an old brown jersey with a strand of wool unravelling at the cuff. She thought how much she loved him.
‘Rafael spent months in Oranienburg. What do you think that was like?’
‘What had he done?’ Alice asked.
Clio’s hand shot out, but Rafael caught her wrist.
‘Don’t,’ he ordered her gently. It was as if there were no one else in the room. He spoke to her alone, for her alone to hear. Alice was completely excluded. ‘You will wake up the baby.’
Alice stood up. She rested her fingers for a moment on the cloth that was still scattered with crumbs from their dinner. Then she walked away and into her bedroom and closed the door. Clio and Rafael heard the key turn in the lock.
They cleared away the dishes and washed up, moving around one another in confined spaces, and made the little rooms tidy again, but Alice did not re-emerge. Later, in the darkness, they made love with Romy breathing evenly in her low bed next to theirs. Clio reached out for Rafael, blindly touching the landmarks of him, aware of the solidity of their happiness.
In the morning, they discovered that Alice was gone.
The door of her room was open, revealing the empty cupboard and the bedclothes roughly pulled up. Romy had woken them early, but Alice must have been up earlier still. She had crept out with her suitcase, leaving them no message.
Romy wandered into her old bedroom and peered around with interest.
‘Alice gone?’ she said.
‘Yes, Romy. Alice has gone, for a little while.’
Clio and Rafael waited anxiously for two days.
They had no idea where Alice might have gone, or even how much money she had had with her. Clio’s only conviction was that she had not returned home, either to London or to Oxford. On the morning of the third day she was on the point of telephoning Eleanor and Nathaniel when the wire came from Berlin: Alice here with me. Few days only. Don’t worry. Julius.
It was Alice who had directed him to wire, Clio knew that, and who had not wanted her to worry about her whereabouts. The two faces of her sister, the unstable fanatic and the affectionate child, slipped and slid in her memory, never coalescing.
‘She will see now what it is like,’ Clio said, through her anxiety.
‘Perhaps,’ Rafael answered.