London, 1938
Julius was playing the D major Mozart Concerto again, but this time there would be no shrill whistling from brownshirts at the back of the hall. The audience at the Wigmore Hall would politely applaud his performance, not too loud or too long, and then disperse to restaurants and supper parties across London.
He put on his tailcoat over his white waistcoat and brushed the lapels out of habit rather than concern for his appearance. He was thinking about the conversations that would be held across those dinner tables; he did not imagine that many of them would touch for too long on the music, or his performance. He would play adequately, he was experienced enough to do that, but the need or the hunger – or even the ability – to achieve more had left him. There would be no fire or fury tonight; there had been none for a long while.
Julius looked at his watch. It was almost time. He flexed his wrists and his fingers, and then picked up his violin. With a practised sweep he tucked it under his chin, closed his eyes and began to play.
The music did not dispel the heaviness that afflicted his limbs as well as his spirit. There had been a time when it did, but now it seemed that he did not have even that resource left within him.
He lowered his bow, and put the violin down again. He sat in the dressing room’s armchair instead and waited for the call.
He came out on stage to the soloist’s applause. When he straightened after making his bow he caught sight of Grace at once. She was sitting in the fourth row, beside Lord and Lady Astor. T.J. Jones, one of the deputy Cabinet Secretaries, was also in the party. Julius was not surprised by the company. Grace had become a regular member of the Cliveden Set.
She was smiling up at him. Her face was like a circle of light in some great, dim space.
Under the cover of the applause that greeted the conductor for the evening he nodded gravely to her.
The normality of his response was a small achievement.
To see her even now gave him pleasure as well as pain, the fiercest combination of the two that was the only feeling that properly stirred him. Julius had stayed in London because there was always the possibility that their paths might cross somewhere, yet he was afraid of what he might do or say when they did meet. He did not want to weep or to implore her, but he did not want to let her out of his sight, now or ever again.
The conductor raised his baton.
Julius lifted his bow again, and began to play.
Tonight he was better than adequate, far better, because he was playing for Grace.
At the end of the concert when he took his bows he saw her white-gloved hands clapping in the dim space. He felt that he was being beaten between her palms. His body and his heart ached.
In the dressing room he took off his coat and hung it up, but he did not pull the ends of his white tie and loosen his collar stud, as he would normally have done. He was thinking, Surely she will come back. Just for a few moments, before she goes on to her political dinner.
When the tap at the door did come and he reached to open it he was already smiling. Her name was in his mouth.
When he saw the tall, silver-haired woman standing in the dingy corridor it took him a few seconds to remember that she was Isolde, Pilgrim’s one-time model and girlfriend. She raised a pencilled eyebrow at him.
‘Is this quite unwelcome?’
‘Of course not. No, of course it isn’t.’ He held the door open wider and Isolde strolled into the dressing room. She inspected it, and then turned to look at him.
‘You played wonderfully. Congratulations.’
‘Thank you.’ Julius peered vaguely around the small space. He felt confused, and silenced by disappointment that this visitor was not Grace after all.
‘Better than the last time I came to a concert of yours, eh?’
Of course, Isolde had been there with Pilgrim that night at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. They had even taken him back to their studio, wherever it was, and he had stayed there for a few days. Hiding from the Nazis. It was odd that he had forgotten that. His memory played tricks on him nowadays. It seemed to obliterate large patches of time, and then to highlight apparently trivial events until they loomed enormously in his mind. He was haunted by recollections of meaningless meals and conversations that had taken place years before.
‘Yes, it was better that that. Look, I would offer you a drink, but I don’t keep anything here …’
Isolde seemed to stare challengingly at him. ‘We could always go to the pub. After you’ve changed.’
‘Yes, we could do that. If you would like to.’
There was another knock at the door. This time it was Grace who was standing there. Again, there was the impression of a bright light. Julius found the conventional words, somehow. He realized that he didn’t know how long it was since he had last spoken to her.
‘Grace, how wonderful. Come in, please come in.’
She put her hands on his arms and he kissed her cheek. The shape and the scent and the feel of her were just the same. The memories of Berlin folded around him, splendid and suffocating.
‘Julius, I can see you’re busy. I just wanted to say that that was wonderful. The Mozart, especially.’ She was warm, and easy, and unaffected. ‘Hello, Isolde.’
‘We were just off to the boozer,’ Isolde said. She had never been an admirer of Grace.
‘Then I won’t keep you. I just wanted to look in and say hello.’
Julius thought that if anything Grace was pleased and relieved by the evidence that he was occupied with another woman, as if it absolved her from the responsibility.
Please stay, he wanted to whisper to her. Please.
He could have cursed Isolde. Grace and he were thirty-seven years old, and like an importunate child he still longed to catch hold of her and imprison her. He knew that Grace saw it too. Her face was suddenly shadowed by the nexus of memories and associations.
‘I’d better go,’ she whispered. ‘They’re waiting for me.’
Julius said woodenly, ‘Yes. Of course.’
There had been a time, perhaps a year ago – after Alice had died – when he would have begged her. At Vincent Street, or in restaurants, once in a booth at a nightclub, although he could not remember the sequence of events that had led them there, he would plead with her. He had wept, or shouted, or grovelled in any other way that might possibly affect her. He had no pride left, and no sense of propriety. It was simply that once he had possessed her, it was unthinkable to be without her.
He understood what until then had seemed an overblown metaphor; after Grace had gone away from him the world had come to an end.
She had stood firm, from the time of Alice’s funeral. Her strength had awed and amazed him.
‘We can’t go back to Berlin.’
They could not go back, nor could she make him understand that the heat of those guilty days had died within her. Once they were back in England, and she had seen Eleanor’s grief and Clio doggedly clinging to the hope of news from Rafael, the flame of love and hope inside her had simply flickered and gone out. There was no future for herself and Julius, and it was a weakness to have imagined that there might be.
Only she would have done anything possible to avoid causing him pain, and whatever she did do seemed to hurt him more deeply. In the end there had been nothing for it but to withdraw altogether. For months they had not seen one another at all. Grace had thrown herself back into her political career, in which dedication and ambition stood in almost convincingly for love and intimacy.
‘Thank you for the music,’ she said softly.
She put her hands on his arms again, white gloves against his white shirtsleeves, and kissed his cheek in return.
Outside the corridor the last members of the orchestra were hauling their instruments away. Grace drew her evening cape around her and listened to the echo of her own heels tapping on the cold tiled floor. She was going to dinner with the Astors in St James Square. The talk would be about Germany and Austria, and Chamberlain’s Anglo-Italian agreement with Mussolini.
‘The pub, wasn’t it?’ Isolde reminded Julius.
Obediently he took off his white tie and waistcoat and pulled on an old sweater and tweed coat. He put his violin into its worn leather case and packed away his tailcoat, then went out into the rainy night with Isolde.
They went to the nearest-but-one pub and sat down at a table in the saloon bar. Julius bought a whisky and lemonade for Isolde and a pint for himself. His head was still full of the sight of Grace with her bare shoulders swathed in fur.
‘Cheers,’ Isolde said brightly, and tipped her glass.
‘How is Pilgrim?’ Julius attempted.
Isolde shrugged. ‘You know Quint. The girls get younger and the drinks go down faster. I don’t know how many pictures he’s selling nowadays.’
Julius nodded. Looking at Isolde he saw that she was still a beauty of a kind. Her silver hair was dark at the roots and her triangular cat’s face was marked with lines, but her manner was still arresting. Several of the pub’s customers had glanced over at her. She might be as old as forty, he calculated, but she had kept her model girl’s body. He felt no stirring of interest in it.
Isolde was examining his face with her small head held on one side. She leant forward suddenly and said, ‘What’s wrong? You can talk to me about it if you want, you know. I’m a good listener.’
‘Nothing is wrong.’
Her warmth touched him, however. He had no wish to talk, but he bought her another whisky and lemonade. Isolde smoked Sobranie cigarettes and chattered to fill the silence. He noticed that she crossed and recrossed her well-shaped legs in front of him and turned in her chair so that the fabric of her skirt stretched over one hip.
‘You are not very like your brother,’ Isolde teased him at last.
‘Jake?’ Julius was startled.
‘Jake would have taken me home and been finished and on his way back to his wife by now.’ She blew out a long column of smoke, and sighed. ‘Or there was a time when he would.’
Julius knew that Jake had women, but he would not have put Isolde on the list.
‘Does that surprise you?’ Isolde’s ankle rubbed against his.
‘A little.’
‘First time was after some bloody private view of Pilgrim’s. Mobs of people, shouting at the tops of their voices, just like always. Albemarle Street, that’s where it was. That terrible portrait of her ladyship and your sister was part of the show.’
‘The Janus Face,’ Julius said.
‘That’s right. Bloody stupid. And Pilgrim was being cocky, and revoltingly rude to poor old Jeannie. So I took your black-bearded brother off home with me. Very nice it was too. I saw him a few times more after that.’ She shrugged her narrow shoulders again. ‘And then it stopped. Just one of those things. Ten, eleven years ago now. Would you believe it?’ Her smile had faded. She was looking down into her empty glass.
‘What happened to Jeannie?’
‘Didn’t you know? She died.’
Julius didn’t want to hear how.
Jeannie had been the first woman he had ever slept with, in his digs in Bloomsbury. She had been Pilgrim’s model and girlfriend also.
There was a symmetry in that, he thought, Jake and Isolde. Jeannie and me. He remembered Jeannie’s loosening flesh, and the fox-red bush of her pubic hair, and the way that her appetite had disconcerted him, the innocent boy.
He had not wanted to sleep with her again.
It came to him now that he had never wanted anything very much. The blankness of his life confronted him like a rock wall. He felt that he was looking up the cliff and from side to side, in search of a hand- or a toehold, but he could see nothing, only the sheer unbroken expanse, stretching away. It gave him vertigo. He felt sad for the poverty of a life that had slipped by almost unlived, and he was also full of fear.
All his adult life, he understood, he had been waiting for Grace. Even when she was married to Anthony, he had found some queer resistance within himself that had enabled him to go on waiting. Before Berlin he had even been content, in his passive way. He had been able to convince himself that there was ample time, in some stately and inexorable progress that they were making towards one another, and that in the end they would be joined together.
Then she had come to him, like lightning splitting a rock, and he had lost her again.
He had been right in Berlin. The central passage of his life had indeed been acted out within the yellow walls of the little hotel bedroom.
And the futility of everything else, before and after that, glared back at him from the cliff face.
Isolde was staring at him. ‘Poor Jeannie. She was drunk. Vomited in her sleep, you know, and then inhaled it. Drowned in her own mess.’
Julius closed his eyes. ‘I have to go, Isolde.’
‘One more drink,’ she said briskly. ‘I’m buying.’
He felt weak, as if standing up and walking to the door presented some great obstacle. The two pints of beer he had drunk were gassy in his stomach. ‘Whisky, then,’ he said.
She came back from the bar with two doubles and put Julius’s in front of him.
‘Drink it,’ she ordered.
He did as he was told, like a sleepwalker.
‘All right,’ Isolde said, when the glasses were empty once more. She put her hand under his elbow and helped him to his feet.
Outside in the street she stepped squarely in front of him. Then she swayed forward so that her hips touched his and the length of her body came warmly against him. She took his face between her hands and kissed him on the mouth. Her tongue darted between his lips.
Julius shivered with cold. The feel of her cheek and mouth and her breasts pressing against him was negligible, neither exciting nor disgusting. It was as if both of them were slabs of meat, and he had no more sensation in his own layers of tissue and muscle and bone than he could detect in the woman’s.
Isolde’s hands fell to her sides. She drew her head back. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘That uninteresting, am I?’
‘It isn’t that –’
She cut him short. ‘Never mind. It was worth a try.’ Julius realized that she must be lonely, just as he was.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said humbly. There was no possibility of anything else.
Isolde was pulling her coat around her. Her hair looked greenish under the streetlights. ‘Look. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will anyway. I saw you back at the Hall with your cousin. If it isn’t any good with you and her you shouldn’t wait about and let it corrode you.’
Corrosion was an interesting word, Julius thought.
He felt quite detached from this street scene. He might have just caught a glimpse of two strangers as he hurried past. It wasn’t corrosion. That was too hot and vicious. Atrophy, perhaps, or palsy.
‘You should go right away and do something else.’ Isolde was frowning, as if she were delivering advice of considerable complexity.
As he had gone away to Berlin, and stayed far too long, his senses slowly atrophying.
‘Thank you for the advice,’ Julius said. ‘Maybe I’ll take it.’
She put her hands in the pocket of her coat and then lifted them away from her sides in an exaggeration of her habitual shrug. ‘OK. Thanks for the drinks.’
‘Thank you.’
She swung away from him, under the streetlight and into the darkness at the corner.
Clio tucked the package of proofs into her bag.
She had spent several evenings correcting the galleys, sitting in the circle of lamplight at her desk after Romy had gone to sleep. The quiet work in the silent house had made her think of the flat in the Marais and she had deliberately fanned the recollections, as a way of making Rafael seem closer. He was alive, she believed unquestioningly, in a camp somewhere, and he would come back. There was no other possibility to be admitted. She had devised a way of talking to him inside her head, and the long monologues eased her isolation by a fraction.
The little rented house in Paradise Square, Oxford, was empty. Romy had gone to spend the day in the Woodstock Road. Clio didn’t often leave her with her grandparents, because a lively four-year-old was too much for Eleanor now. But Cressida was also there, staying with Eleanor while Grace was away on some Parliamentary tour, and Cressida adored the little girl and had more than enough energy to spare for her.
It was time to walk to the station to catch the London train.
Clio checked yet again that the precious proofs of her book were safely stowed away. Then she looked in her purse, to be sure that she had just enough money for her fare and a sandwich. The sight of a folded pound note reassured her. Clio supported herself with odds and ends of journalistic work, and by editing and proofreading for the University Press. There was never much to spare, but she felt richer than she had done when she had been supporting Miles Lennox.
Clio folded her mackintosh over her arm and locked the street door behind her. She waved to the woman next door who was crossing the square with her baby in its pram, and turned towards the station.
A year ago she had wondered whether it was a regressive step to come back to live in Oxford. But she was comfortable here, if it was possible to be comfortable anywhere without Rafael.
Paradise Square lay at the heart of a run-down working-class area of tiny streets and terraced houses to the west of Carfax in the city centre. Clio liked the feeling of a community that looked out for its own, and at the same time kept itself to itself, and Romy had made friends amongst the children who played over the cobbles and unkempt grass in the square. They lived a quiet and uneventful life together. Clio often talked about Rafael to the child, trying to keep the memories of him alive in her.
By twelve o’clock, Clio was in London. She took the tube from Paddington to Chancery Lane, and then walked past the huge plane trees of Gray’s Inn to the offices of Randle & Cates, the publishers. She passed close by the old Fathom offices, although the little magazine had published its last issue almost two years ago and Max Erdmann had moved on to other ventures.
She looked at her watch as she walked up the steps to the publishers’ front door. It was bad timing, she realized with a flush of embarrassment. Tony Hardy would think that she was expecting to be taken out to lunch. He had said any time on Friday morning, and she had taken him at his word. She had had to take Romy to the Woodstock Road and settle her there, or she would have been able to come earlier.
She did not expect lunch. To have her Berlin novel published was more than enough. Tony Hardy’s enthusiasm for it was all the food and drink she needed. Perhaps she could pretend that she was expected elsewhere.
But as soon as the receptionist had telephoned up from her desk in the front office, a door was flung open above and Tony Hardy ran down the curving stairs. ‘Hooray,’ he shouted over the banister. ‘You’re here in perfect time for me to take you out to celebrate. We’ll do the dull bits with the proofs later, shall we?’
He took her by the arm and led her out into the street.
‘I’d like to have taken you to the Eiffel, for old times’ sake. But Stulik has sold up and gone, did you know that?’
‘No, I didn’t know,’ Clio said sadly. She would have liked to have eaten one last plat du jour or gâteau St Honoré at one of the little tables with their red-shaded lamps. It was almost twenty years since Pilgrim had first taken her there with Grace, in their débutante dresses.
‘The Etoile, then,’ Tony Hardy said. He waved for a cab.
A taxi was a luxury for Clio nowadays, and she could not remember the last time she had eaten a meal in a restaurant. She settled back into the stuffy interior with a small, unfamiliar ripple of pleasure.
Charlotte Street looked the same as it had always done. Clio found herself glancing towards the old studio for a glimpse of Pilgrim slouching with a sketchbook under his arm to the Wheatsheaf, or the Marquis, or the Fitzroy. She didn’t even know where Pilgrim was nowadays. The last time she had seen him was a brief, surprising glimpse at Alice’s funeral.
‘What would you like?’ Tony smiled at her over the serious menu when they were settled at their table.
Clio was hungry. Randle & Cates were paying; the thought that Pilgrim had always steered her to the plat du jour made her smile so that the publisher glanced speculatively at her.
It is a celebration, Clio thought. I shall be a published novelist. And then, as inevitable as her own heartbeat, came the wish, if only Rafael could be here.
‘The lobster, please,’ Clio said.
‘And a bottle of champagne to go with it.’ Tony Hardy lifted his glass in a toast. ‘To Berlin Diary.’
The proofs were in the bag at her feet. She had made the last corrections with meticulous care. It was hard to believe that her book was passing out of her hands now. After this afternoon it would begin its slow progress into the territory of the autumn list, and the hands of the publishers’ reps, and the booksellers and the critics.
She felt a thrill of protective fear for it. The diary of her first days in Berlin had become a novel, but the knotted roots of the story were inextricably buried within herself. Last night she had typed a small slip of paper to be pasted into the front of the galleys.
For Rafael Wolf.
Clio raised her glass. ‘To the book.’
‘Thank you for bringing it to us,’ Tony said.
Clio had never been quite sure why she had done so. She knew plenty of other publishers, from her Fathom days.
‘I think we shall do well with it,’ he told her.
‘That’s why I wanted Randles to publish it.’
Clio enjoyed her lunch. Tony Hardy’s mild literary gossip and news of shared acquaintances reminded her of other times, and made her realize that the months she had spent living in her little house in Oxford alone with Romy had left her thoroughly out of touch with the world. She felt no particular desire for closer acquaintance, because she had no capacity for wishing for anything beyond Rafael’s safety. Her longing for that made other shortages and adversities surprisingly easy to bear.
When they emerged into the mid afternoon Clio found herself blinking in the sharp light after the restful dimness of the restaurant. She rarely drank now, and the champagne and a cognac to follow it had left her feeling sleepy and faintly stupid. They were standing side by side, looking into the traffic for a cab to take them back to Tony’s office.
At first, Clio was not even surprised to see Miles Lennox. He was walking towards them, swinging an umbrella with vicious little strokes. He was a part of this world, of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia and whichever one of the neighbouring pubs he had just emerged from. His steps were not quite steady.
‘Oh, God,’ Tony Hardy muttered.
Clio felt the blow of shock then. This was Miles, with his coat and his umbrella and his tie knotted under a frayed collar; her husband. She had not seen him since she had left Berlin for the first time, pregnant with Romy.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tony added. She was not sure if he was apologizing for his own lack of enthusiasm or in advance for the coming encounter.
Miles had seen them too. He stopped, with exaggerated amazement, and put a hand out to the restaurant railings to steady himself. His face looked puffy and congested. The last vestiges of his boyish good looks had disappeared.
Clio thought of the man’s black-rimmed fingernails on her bedsheets, and she knew in that minute why she had gone to Tony Hardy with her manuscript. It was because of Miles, of course. Miles admired Tony, and had wanted him to publish the rambling monologue of his own novel. She had done it as a means of stabbing back at him, because he had hurt her. To have Tony Hardy praising her work was like slipping a blade deep into the heart of Miles’s vanity and cruelty.
Seeing her husband now, Clio felt ashamed of that impulse.
Miles puckered his lips and raised his eyebrows in a parody of genteel disapproval.
‘What a very bizarre partnership,’ he said. ‘My wife, and Mr Hardy. Now, Clio darling, I wouldn’t have thought that you were at all Tony’s type for an afternoon in Charlotte Street. But there, life is full of wonderful surprises.’
‘Clio is an author of ours,’ Tony said bluntly. ‘We are publishing her rather fine first novel in our autumn list.’
Miles’s mouth twisted. He had drunk too much to be able to disguise his bitterness. It seemed to swell within him like gas in a corpse, puffing out his face and pinching his lips over his discoloured teeth. He let go of the railings and stood upright, swaying only a little.
‘Life is full of wonderful surprises,’ he repeated.
Clio wished that Tony had said nothing, or that Miles could have passed this spot five minutes earlier or later. There was nothing but humiliation for both of them in this encounter. She had loved this man, and married him, and spent four years of her life hoping and working in his service. If it seemed inconceivable today, that was her fault as much as Miles’s.
But she couldn’t let him go by now, wandering off into the desert of the afternoon, without making some acknowledgement.
She put her hand out to him.
‘Miles? Tony and I have some work to do now, but it shouldn’t take more than an hour. Why don’t we meet somewhere afterwards? We could have tea, perhaps?’
He seemed to consider. ‘Tea?’
‘Or whisky. Whatever you like.’
Tony was waiting.
Miles said at length, ‘An hour? I will come and get you from Mr Hardy’s offices. Four o’clock.’
He set off again, swinging his umbrella, without looking at Tony.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tony said again, when they were in a taxi on the way back to his office.
‘Why do you have to apologize?’ Clio asked. She felt the need to defend Miles, and was exasperated by it and by herself. They sat through the rest of the short journey in silence.
Tony laid the long sheets of the galleys on his desk and they spend an hour going through the amendments that Clio had made. And then at four o’clock exactly he escorted her down to the front door. There was no sign of Miles. They shook hands.
‘Thank you for the lunch,’ Clio said.
He looked kindly at her. ‘Thank you for the book. It will be a success, you know.’
Suddenly she realized that it might be. Another small, unfamiliar dart of happiness pierced her.
She had preferred to wait for Miles outside Randle & Cates. For ten minutes she strolled up and down in the sunshine, conscious of the people glancing out at her from the office windows above and opposite. Then she saw him coming round the corner from the direction of Charlotte Street. He lifted his umbrella and brandished it at her.
Clio remembered how long ago, at the beginning, she had been excited and pleased by the sight of him, and how quickly that pleasure had turned to anxiety for what he would do, or how he would treat her.
She waited until he reached her and then smiled as warmly as she could. She could smell the whisky on his breath.
‘There’s an Italian café in Queen Square, isn’t there? Or there used to be. Shall we try that?’
‘Wherever you like,’ Miles said, without much interest.
It seemed incongruous to be walking along together. Now that they were here, Clio wondered why she had felt the impulse to suggest this meeting.
The café was still there, with the same wooden chairs and rickety tables that she remembered. It had a continental atmosphere, and it made her think of Paris and Rafael. She sat down instead with Miles, and watched him take out a tin of tobacco and fumblingly roll a thin cigarette. There were yellow nicotine burns on his fingers that had not been there before.
The waitress, a fat Italian girl, came to take their order. Clio couldn’t think of eating after her lunch, and Miles looked as if he could no longer be bothered to eat at all.
‘Won’t you have a sandwich? Or cake, or something?’ Clio asked.
He drew on his cigarette. Whiskers of smouldering tobacco protruded from the end of it. ‘I’m not an infant who needs feeding.’
‘Just tea, for two please.’
The waitress shrugged and slopped away.
Miles examined the room and the scattering of shoppers and office workers. ‘This is cosy.’
There was a twist to his mouth again. Clio saw the patina of sneering aggression, and the disappointment that lay beneath it like worm-eaten timber.
It was simpler to be honest in response. ‘Does it matter what the café is like? Would you have preferred us just to have passed by each other on the pavement outside the Etoile? It seemed appropriate at least to meet somewhere.’
‘Oh, let us always do what is appropriate.’
Clio poured out the tea and handed him his cup. The gesture seemed to parody the domestic life they had once shared.
‘Tell me about the rather fine first novel,’ Miles suggested.
‘I’ll tell you if you would like to hear. It’s about Berlin.’
Clio described her book, and the way that her diary of the days after the Reichstag fire had slowly metamorphosed into a novel, a love story.
‘Healthy heterosexual sex and a dash of Nazism? I’m sure that will sell.’
She was not expecting anything more generous. ‘Tony Hardy believes so.’ She recalled again why she had chosen Tony. ‘And your own work?’
‘Ah. Changed, and improved. But I don’t believe the climate is right for it. There is a stolidity about fiction now, a rootedness, that is the complete opposite of everything I want to do. One has to be patient.’
‘How do you live?’ Clio wondered if it was patience that had puffed up his face and shrivelled the rest of him so that the collar of his shirt stood away from the cords in his neck.
‘Some hack work. Other small things. Reviewing and editing. You know how it is.’
She did know how narrow the margin was between survival and extinction. It must have been so much more comfortable for Miles, she thought, when he was living in Gower Street with a wife to cook and care and provide for him. He had been so sure of her.
‘Yes, I know how it is.’
‘How is your child?’
‘Well, thank you.’
They doled out this small currency to each other over the teacups.
‘I heard that your friend was arrested again.’
Miles had been going to add, ‘Careless, that,’ but he swallowed the words. Clio’s face affected him.
‘Yes. He must be in a camp, somewhere. Romy and I pray that he is, anyway.’
The alternative was not to be thought of, now or ever.
Clio lifted her head to look straight at Miles. ‘I would like a divorce,’ she said.
She had not brought Miles here with the intention in her mind. But it was clear to her now. He laughed so loudly and abruptly that two middle-aged women at a nearby table turned to peer at him.
‘What must I do? Take a tart down to Brighton and make sure the chambermaid and a private detective are there to watch?
‘You may divorce me, if you wish. We are equally guilty, I suppose.’
Their teacups were empty. The waitress came to clear them away.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Miles answered at length. ‘Do it any way you like. You want to marry your German Adonis?’
‘Yes. When he comes back.’
He must come.
‘How very romantic.’
More romantic that paid sex with dirty hands in our marriage bed.
Clio had an image of her marriage like an inverted pyramid, narrowing and dwindling away to a speck, and finally vanishing here and now in the Italian café in Queen Square.
She took out her purse and paid for their tea, and then hoisted her handbag over her shoulder. It was much lighter without the proofs tucked inside it. With Miles behind her, she went out into the street again. It was time to head for Paddington and the Oxford train.
Miles was struggling to put on his coat, and automatically she held one sleeve for him and then turned down the collar at the back.
He seemed frail and irritable, like a much older man. Clio guessed that he might slide downwards now, drinking more and eating less, until he could no longer detect the boundary between survival and the opposite.
But then, he might just as easily find his feet again. Miles had the requisite selfish determination. She was cheered by the optimistic thought, and he saw the light of it in her eyes. He held out his hand and she shook it.
They did not attempt a kiss.
They said goodbye, and turned in opposite directions.
‘Good luck,’ he called after her. She looked back, just for a moment, but Miles was already walking away.
Clio had no doubt of her own ability to survive. It had never been called into question. She would do it, whatever it cost, for Rafael and Romy’s sake.
It was much later than she had intended when she reached the Woodstock Road again. She let herself in and at once heard the sound of Romy’s excited laughter. She hesitated, listening to the voices, and then ran across the hallway with a wilful flicker of hope.
In the drawing room she saw that it was only Jake who was swinging Romy up into the air. Her chubby legs flailed over her head as she gasped with pleasurable fear. Cressida was watching them, laughing too, and Tabby was perched on the piano stool calling out to Jake to be careful.
Clio was used to the kindling and rapid extinction of hope. Her face gave nothing away as she went to catch Romy out of Jake’s arms.
‘Mummy! Mummy’s back! Uncle Jake is throwing me.’
‘I can see that. Jake, this is a surprise.’
Romy was set on her feet again, and Clio pressed her cheek against the springy mass of Jake’s beard. He kissed her on the forehead.
‘I’ve been at a medical conference. I was going back tonight, but Pappy said you had gone to London to see your publishers and Mama persuaded me to stay to dinner. I’ll get the early train back tomorrow. Ruth won’t mind, she’s got a Jewish Women’s Federation evening.’
‘How nice that you’re here,’ Clio said happily. She saw Jake far less often than she would like. It seemed also that Ruth and Jake were separately busy for much of their time.
‘Cress, Tabby, hello too.’
The drawing room felt warm and welcoming. Romy was running in circles on the oriental rug. The house might almost have been as it always was, before they all grew up.
‘Romy has been good,’ Cressida said.
‘I have. I ate all my lunch, and I had egg for my tea and Cressy took me to the Parks.’
‘You lucky girl. You haven’t missed me, then?’
‘Not badly much.’
Clio was glad. It worried her that she and Romy lived in too close proximity, and that in Rafael’s absence they filled too large a space in one another’s lives. She said, ‘Daddy would be pleased with you.’
Behind her, Jake and Tabitha glanced at one another.
‘Time for a drink,’ Jake announced quickly. ‘Sherry? Has Pappy got any Scotch, Tabby, d’you think?’
‘Where are they both, anyway?’
Clio sat down on the sofa beneath Pilgrim’s portrait and drew Romy on to her lap. It was a pleasure to come home, to the house that she still thought of as home, and to find Jake filling the thin and over-quiet air of the old place with talk.
‘Aunt Eleanor is resting and Uncle Nathaniel had a seminar, but he’ll be in soon,’ Cressida answered.
Jake had found the whisky bottle before they heard Nathaniel’s book bag thumping down on to the tiles in the hall.
‘Pappy!’
‘Grandpappy!’ Romy scrambled down from Clio’s lap and ran to find him. A moment later Nathaniel came in with the child in his arms.
Nathaniel seemed physically smaller and less of a dominant presence than he once had been. His beard was more white than grey, and his shoulders had rounded into a stoop. It was Jake who looked like the tribal leader now. But there was a close link between Romy and her grandfather.
They searched for one another when they came into a room, and they were always happy in one another’s company. Nathaniel was whispering in Romy’s ear.
‘Mummy!’ she shrieked. ‘Grandpappy says I can stay up for proper dinner with him and you if I’m seen and not heard.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, Clio, do let her. She had a sleep this afternoon.’
‘Cressida, you traitor.’
‘I want to stay up too,’ Jake shouted. ‘I shall scream if I’m not allowed to. Pappy, I will.’
‘Be quiet, Jake.’
The noise was like it used to be. Eleanor sailed into the midst of them. She had changed for dinner, as she always did, and her silky skirts rustled around her. She had never cut her hair, and it was wound up in elaborate coils on top of her head and secured with tortoiseshell combs. Out of long-standing habit too she greeted her husband first, putting her hands on his arms and reaching up to be kissed. Then she made the rounds of her children and they gathered in a circle around her.
‘Can I stay up, Grandma? Can I, can I?’
‘Yes darling, of course you can.’
‘I am overruled,’ Clio sighed, without regret. It gave her quiet pleasure to see Romy here with her family.
When Clio had first brought her child home to Oxford Eleanor had been caught between the need to uphold her Victorian morality and her natural warmth towards all of her family. She had tried to keep her granddaughter at arms’ length, but then Clio had begun to notice how her eyes followed Romy’s blonde head. Romy was growing to look more and more like her father. There was none of the Hirsh darkness about her.
And then, very gradually in the long months after Alice’s death, Romy had begun to provide a prop for Eleanor and Nathaniel. Some of her energy and brightness had seemed to pass into them by slow osmosis. She became her grandparents’ favourite and their safe focus.
‘Shall we go in?’ Eleanor said tranquilly. Her husband took her arm and Jake bent down to offer his to Romy. Clio and Tabby and Cressida followed on behind them.
Romy was given a place of honour at the foot of the table, boosted almost to adult height by three cushions.
Looking across at her Clio was visited by a memory of Alice, sitting in just the same place. She was wearing a white dress, and a gold-paper crown on her black wire curls.
It must have been a birthday party; there were jellies and ribbons and fondant sweets on the white linen cloth.
Alice’s sixth birthday. The day that Grace had been discovered upstairs in Captain Dennis’s bedroom. Alice’s sixth birthday.
There had been the terrible quarrel with Grace.
You have to have everything, don’t you? Clio could hear her own voice, smothered and small with her anger. You have to have everything, don’t you? I hate you, Grace.
‘Clio, are you all right?’ It was Tabby, looking at her with concern. ‘You’ve gone white.’
‘Have I? Yes, I’m all right. I felt dizzy for a minute. Pass me the water jug, could you?’
Family dinner, like so many family dinners before it. Jake and Nathaniel vociferously arguing. Girls with tidied hair and clothes. Alice waving her knife and fork at the end of the table, spilling food on the cloth, and Eleanor rebuking her.
Not Alice, but Romy.
After dinner, there would be the wireless news. They would hear if Hitler had attacked Czechoslovakia, and brought the threat of war closer. On her way to the train at Paddington Clio had seen a woman carrying a new gas-mask in its case. She could remember the start of the last war, and the half-heard and half-guessed adult anxieties that had whispered in the house.
Fearfully she looked down the table again, to Romy in her place of honour. What would happen to Rafael, in Germany, if the war came?
‘Clio?’
Someone had asked her a question. She smiled, and murmured an apology. It had been Eleanor.
‘Darling, I only asked about your meeting with your publisher.’
Jake was chewing vigorously, showing his red mouth. He pointed his fork at her.
‘Mummy’s written a book,’ Romy contributed wisely.
‘Yes, how is the famous novelist?’
‘Not very famous yet. I went through the proof corrections, and he explained how much it costs nowadays to reset a line of type. It sounds as if I shall end up in debt to Randle & Cates, rather than the other way around. Unless they sell more than a dozen copies, that is.’
‘We’ll buy one each. I’m sure Oswald Harris will take another. There, you are almost in profit already.’
Clio joined in the laughter. She wouldn’t tell them that she had seen Miles. There was, in any case, nothing to say.
Towards the end of the meal Romy’s head began to droop. Nathaniel hoisted her off her chair, leaving Alice’s place empty. He held her on his knee and she fell asleep with her head against her grandfather’s shirtfront.
Eleanor rolled up her napkin and put it neatly through its silver ring. ‘We’ll have our coffee in the drawing room, shall we? Mary will have put the tray in there.’ Eleanor had only a cook and one housemaid to help her run the diminished household.
They went through, with Nathaniel carrying Romy in his arms. He put her on the sofa and covered her with a Paisley shawl.
‘I’ll take her home soon,’ Clio said, without moving. It was comfortable in the armchair with her coffee cup. Cressida had gone to the piano and was picking out a waltz with Jake humming over her shoulder. Tabby was sitting under the lamp with her sewing.
‘Play some more, Cressida,’ Nathaniel murmured. With his head back against the cushions he was ready to doze.
In his study the telephone rang.
‘I’ll go,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s Blanche.’
Clio and Jake smiled at each other. The telepathic closeness between the twins seemed to strengthen rather than diminish with age.
Eleanor was gone for a long time. Cressida played and Jake sang a sentimental Victorian ballad, and then Tabby put down her work and joined in a duet. Nathaniel had dropped off to sleep, but Clio laughed and applauded.
‘I don’t think you can possibly guess what the news is.’
They looked up to see Eleanor standing in the doorway.
‘It isn’t the war?’ Cressida whispered.
But Eleanor’s eyes were bright. ‘Not bad news, darling. Good news.’
‘I give up,’ Tabby sighed. ‘Tell us at once.’
‘Hugo is engaged to be married.’
The chorus of amazement woke Nathaniel up. Hugo seemed to have settled long ago to a bachelor life, absorbed in the management of his estate and in county affairs. He seldom went beyond the margins of his own land. It had long been assumed in the family that Thomas and Thomas’s children were his heirs.
‘Who is she?’
‘Hugo doesn’t have women.’
‘Hugo has farm plans and harvest festival suppers with the farmhands.’
‘Well, he has a fiancée now, Jake, whatever you might have to say.’
‘Who is she, Mama, for goodness sake?’
‘She is a Miss Lucy Frobisher.’
‘Sounds like a nursery rhyme. Or a tale by Beatrix Potter.’
‘Frobisher? Weren’t there some Stretton neighbours called Frobisher?’ Clio asked. ‘I remember Uncle John used to talk about hunting or not hunting over their land.’
‘Yes. She is the younger daughter of some good Shropshire people. She is twenty-three years old, Blanche says, and very pretty and suitable. Hugo has known her since she was a child, of course, but they have only very recently fallen in love.’
‘The old devil. He’s well over forty.’
‘Only seven months older than you, Jake, as you perfectly well know. The age difference between them is less than there was between Blanche and John.’
‘Hugo’s a catch for any girl. She’ll be the Countess of Leominster.’
‘He’s chosen a good breeder, I hope,’ Jake said seriously. Cressida laughed behind her hand.
Nathaniel laced his fingers across his chest. ‘I suppose there’ll have to be a wedding, now.’
‘It’s the usual procedure, Pappy.’
‘Blanche says they will be having a big wedding in the New Year. At Stretton, of course. And a ball, and dinners for estate people and tenants. It will be a great deal of work for her, but she is determined that it will be done properly, the way John would have wanted it. It’s only a pity that Grace and Phoebe are not at home to help her a little more.’
Phoebe had married a banker, with a house in Kensington and two small children of her own.
‘A real, old-fashioned county wedding.’ Clio sighed. She was thinking of Stretton, en fête, and the little grey church on the estate filled with flowers and local people and the great families, and the old house decorated and filled with music and dancing to celebrate the marriage of the Earl. She was surprised by how much the idea moved her. It would be an affirmation that not quite everything had changed; it would be England both at its grandest and its simplest.
‘I’m very happy for them. I shall dance at their wedding, for one. Well done, Hugo and Miss Lucy Frobisher.’
‘Quite right, Clio,’ Nathaniel agreed.
‘It is very Culmington,’ Jake said.