All My Sins Remembered

All My Sins Remembered

BY ROSIE THOMAS

Contents

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

Copyright

About the Publisher

London, 1990

It was a lie, but it was not a lie that could do any damage.

The writer reflected on the relative harmlessness of what she was doing as she waited on the step for the doorbell to be answered. It was a cold and windy autumn afternoon, and the trees that bordered the canal in Little Venice were shedding their leaves into the water. She had turned away to look at the play of light in the ripples drawn behind a barge when the door opened at last behind her.

There was a smiling nurse in a blue dress. ‘Mrs Ainger, hello there. Come in, now.’

‘How is she today?’ Elizabeth Ainger asked.

‘Not so bad at all. Quite clear in the head, as a matter of fact. She even asked when you were coming.’

‘She’s getting used to me,’ the biographer said. ‘I’m glad it’s one of her good days.’

The nurse showed her into a drawing room at the rear of the house with a view of a small garden through double doors. There were porcelain ornaments arranged on the marble mantelpiece, a little blue painting of an interior hanging above them, embroidered cushions and faded rose-patterned loose covers. These neat, traditional furnishings were faintly at odds with the picture that hung on the wall behind the old lady’s chair. It was a double portrait, in oils, of two young women. They were looking away from each other, out of the frame of the picture, and there was tension in every line of their bodies. The painter’s peculiarly hectic style owed something to Picasso, and something to Stanley Spencer.

It was so quiet in the room, away from the noise of the traffic, that the occupant might have been sitting in some cottage in the country instead of in the middle of London.

‘Hello, Aunt Clio,’ Elizabeth said. The nurse withdrew, and closed the door behind her.

The tiny old woman in the velvet-upholstered chair was not really Elizabeth’s aunt, but her grandmother’s first cousin. But it was to ‘Aunt Clio’s’ house in Oxford that Elizabeth had been taken on visits with her mother when she was a little girl. She could just remember the rooms, with their forbidding shelves of dark books, and her childish impression that Aunt Clio was important, but in some way not easy.

When Elizabeth was seven, her American father had taken his wife and daughter back to live in Oregon, and there had only been birthday cards and Christmas presents from Oxford after that. By the time Elizabeth was grown up herself, and had come back to live in the country of her birth, the links had been all but broken. Until this series of visits had begun, the two women had not met for thirty years.

Clio turned her head a fraction to look at her visitor. ‘It’s you, is it?’

Elizabeth smiled and shrugged, deprecatingly held out her tape-recorder.

‘I am afraid so. Do you feel too tired to talk today?’

‘I am not in the least tired.’

She did not look it, either. Her body was tiny and frail, but her eyes were bright and sharp like fish caught in their nets of wrinkles. She watched Elizabeth Ainger sitting down, adopting a familiar position in the chair opposite to her own, and fiddling with her little tape-recorder.

‘I just wonder why you are not bored to death with all these old tales?’

With a show of cheerful patience the younger woman answered, ‘You can’t tell me anything that will bore me. I am your biographer, remember?’

That was the lie, but it came out fluently enough.

The biography was not of her relative, Clio Hirsh, although she would not have been an inappropriate subject, but of Clio’s first cousin.

Lady Grace Brock, née Stretton, was Elizabeth’s maternal grand-mother. She was the daughter of an Earl, a famous socialite in her day and then one of the first women Members of Parliament.

Elizabeth had never met her, but she was fascinated by her. And her enthusiasm had communicated itself to her publisher when they had met to discuss over lunch what Elizabeth’s next project might be as a middle-range, moderately successful author of popular biographies.

‘Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard did well enough,’ the published mused. ‘Although your grandmother is not quite so well known, of course. Why don’t you put some material together for us to have a look at?’

Elizabeth’s mother and the rest of the family had warned her at the outset that Clio was famously reluctant to talk about her cousin and friend. The defences that the old lady duly put up against Elizabeth’s first casual enquiries were infuriating, and impregnable, but she needed her co-operation, and so Elizabeth had pretended that it was a family biography that she was researching, with particular emphasis on Clio’s own life.

Elizabeth was invited to call at the house in Little Venice. The first visit had led to a series of interviews, and Elizabeth had patiently waited and listened.

It would not matter if the finished book was not what had been promised. Books took a long time to write, and Clio was very old and no longer reliably clear in her own mind.

Clio said irritably, ‘I bore myself. Who could possibly want to read anything about me? I wish I hadn’t agreed to this rigmarole.’

‘But you did agree.’

‘I know that. And having agreed to it, I am doing it.’ She was tart, as she often was on her lucid days. Elizabeth knew that Clio did not care for her, but she took the trouble to conceal her own reciprocal irritation.

‘We were talking about Blanche and Eleanor, last time I was here,’ Elizabeth prompted.

‘You know it all. You’ve seen all their letters, the papers. What more do you want to hear?’

‘Just what you remember. Only that.’

The old woman sighed. She was almost ninety. She remembered so many things but she had forgotten more. The firm connective tissue of memory that once held the flesh of her life together had all but dissolved. There were only incidents to recall now, isolated like the tips of submerged rocks rearing out of a wide sea.

Then, in a stronger voice, Clio suddenly said, ‘I remember my Aunt Blanche’s scent. White lilac, and burnt hair. They frizzed their hair, you know, in those days. With curling tongs that the maid heated red-hot in the fire. I remember the smell of burning hair.’

Elizabeth pressed the record button, and then sat quietly, listening as Clio talked. This was the pattern of her visits.

One

The old woman sat propped in her nest of cushions and rugs. Her hands rested like small ivory carvings on the rubbed velvet arms of the chair. The visitor waited, watching her to see if she would doze, or sit in silence, or if today would be a talking day.

Clio said to Elizabeth, not looking at her but away somewhere else, a long way off, ‘I remember the holidays. There were always wonderful holidays.’ She tilted her head, listening to something that reminded her.

When she thought about it, she supposed that had been Nathaniel’s doing. Nathaniel applied the same principles to holidays as to his work. He could turn the radiance of his enthusiasm equally on the business of enjoyment or the pleasures of academic discipline. And Nathaniel’s enthusiasm infected them all, all of his children. When the time came for the family migrations, excitement would fill the red-brick house with high-pitched twittering, like real birds. Clio could hear the starlings out in the garden now. It must be their chorus that had taken her back. The nurse would have tipped the crusts of the breakfast toast on the bird-table.

‘Where did you go?’ Cressida’s daughter Elizabeth asked.

‘Different places.’ Clio glanced at her, suddenly sly. ‘Grace and the others used to come with us, too.’ It amused her to see how the mention of Grace sharpened the other’s attention. It always did.

There had been different holidays, but almost always beside the sea. They would take a house, or two houses, if one was not big enough for Hirshes and Strettons together, with their retinue of nursemaids and attendants. The children and their mothers would stay there all the long summer, and the two fathers would visit when they could.

Only they almost never came at the same time. Nathaniel would go away for some of those summer vacations on reading parties with his undergraduates, or on visits to Paris and Berlin. And John Leominster had the estate at Stretton to attend to, and business in London, and the affairs of his club.

It was Blanche and Eleanor who were always there.

Clio and Grace and the boys ran over the expanses of rawly glittering sand, or hung over the rock pools, or dragged their shrimping nets through fringes of seaweed before lifting them in arcs of diamond spray to examine the catch. It was the mothers they always ran back to, to show off the mollusc or sidling crab, Jake pounding ahead with Julius at his heels, and shoulder to shoulder, the two girls, with their skirts gathered up in one hand and their sharp elbows sticking out. If one of them could manage a dig at the other, to make her swerve or miss her footing, then so much the better. It would mean reaching the boys first, having the chance to blurt out with them the news of the tiny discovery, while the loser came sulkily behind, forced to pretend that nothing mattered less.

The two nannies sat with the nursemaid in a sheltered corner at the top of the beach. The little brothers and sisters, Hirshes and Strettons, played at their feet or slept in their perambulators. These babies were beneath the attention of the bigger children. The flying feet swept past, sending up small plumes of silvery sand, heading for the mothers.

Blanche and Eleanor sat a little distance apart, beneath a complicated canvas awning. They were protected from the sun and the sea breeze by panels of canvas that unrolled from the roof-edge. The little pavilion was carried down to the beach every morning and erected by Blanche’s chauffeur, who also brought down their canvas chairs and spread out the rugs on which they rested their feet. One year Hugo Stretton had made a red knight’s pennant to fly from the top of the supporting pole. This spot of scarlet was the focus of the beach, however far the children wandered. The twin sisters sat beneath it in the canvas shade, watching their families and mildly gossiping. Sometimes there was a husband nearby, either Nathaniel Hirsh, with his black beard bristling over a book, or John Leominster, bowling at Hugo who stood in front of a makeshift wicket and squinted fiercely at the spinning ball. But if neither husband was there, Blanche and Eleanor were equally content. They found one another’s company perfectly satisfactory, as they had always done.

It was always Jake who reached them first.

‘Look at this, Mama, Aunt Blanche. Look what we found.’

Then Julius would plunge down into the sand beside him. ‘
I
found it. It came up in my net.’

And one of the girls would drop between the two of them, panting for breath and grinning in her triumph. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Can we keep it for a pet? I’ll look after it, I promise I will.’

The second girl would stumble up, red-faced and pouting. ‘Don’t be silly, you can’t keep things like that for pets. They aren’t domestic,’ Clio would say scornfully, because it was the only option left open to her. It was usually Clio. Grace was quicker and more determined in getting what she wanted. She usually won the races.
It isn’t fair
, Clio had thought, almost from the time she had been able to think. Jake is my brother and Julius is my
twin
. They’re both mine, Grace is only an outsider.

But Grace never behaved like an outsider, and never behaved as if she owed her Hirsh cousins any thanks for her inclusion in their magic circle. She took it loftily, as her right.

The children knelt in a ring, at their mothers’ feet. Jake put his hand into the net and lifted out their catch to show it off. Blanche and Eleanor bent their identical calm faces and padded coiffures over him, ready to admire.