All My Sins Remembered (12 page)

Grace almost toppled under his leaning weight but he caught her, and they half fell and half lay down in the grass under their hawthorn hedge. Jake pressed himself on top of her, and his hands found the hem of her white dress, and the folds of her petticoat, all the mysterious layers of feminine apparel, and then the little mound between her legs, tight and innocent like the smooth rump of a small animal.

‘Jake,
Jake
,’ Grace was almost screaming. For an instant she was stronger than he was. She pushed him aside and scrambled up, snatching her crushed hat from beneath him. There was grass caught in her hair and in the tucks of her dress. She crammed her hat on her tumbled hair and ran away, towards the voices, her own cry rising to theirs, ‘Coming to find you. Coming to
find
you.’

Jake rolled on to his side and lay staring through the stalks of grass, reduced to the same level as the insects that crossed his limited field of vision. The grass was damp against his cheek, but he was sticky with heat and he found that he was panting for breath. He lay still until his breathing steadied again, watching the miniature world inches from his face.

The voices were a long way off now; he knew that he was alone. Grace had run away from him, and a kind of carelessness replaced his anxiety. He found that he didn’t mind that she was gone, that he was even relieved. Dreamily, still watching the waving blades of grass, Jake undid his clothes. It felt indecent to be exposed in the open air, in daylight, but the air was deliciously cool. He stretched out, flattening himself against the earth, his thoughts stilled.

He closed his fingers around himself, tentatively at first, and then with a firmer grasp.

After a month, a long month of suppressing himself, it did not take much. He was not thinking of Grace, or of anything at all except obeying his instincts. The pleasure of the orgasm raced all through his body, wave after wave, but the satisfaction and relief that followed it was better. It was like a blessing. His limbs felt heavy and soft, like a baby’s, and he curled on his side listening to the empty air.

Jake opened his eyes again on the grass world, and then on the sky over his head. Heavy, piled clouds had rolled over the sun, but the margins of them were still rimmed with gold. He smiled, and raised himself on one elbow, then sat up and spread his arms until the joints cracked. He saw that there were pearly drops on the grass where he had been lying, bending the blades of grass. They didn’t look ugly, or unnatural, or in any way unclean. They seemed shiny and quite innocent. Jake waited for the waves of guilt to come, echoing the pleasure, but nothing did. He only felt calm, and comfortable.

He stood up then, buttoning his trousers up. Then he bent down and tore some handfuls of the long grass, and dropped them over the evidence of himself in the sheltered angle of the hawthorn hedge. He felt light and springy, full of energy. He had done nothing wrong, it occurred to him. He was right, and all the murky advice and warnings he had been given were wrong.

He lifted his head and called loudly, ‘Coming to find you.’

Nathaniel had been right about the thunderstorm. It broke in the early evening, sending Tabby and the housemaids scuttling to Nanny in the nursery and making Alice break out in wails of uncomprehending protest.

Clio and Grace sat in their bedroom while the rain drummed on the roof and bounced in fat drops off the streaming Woodstock Road. Grace was humming and brushing Clio’s hair, long rhythmic strokes that made it spark and crackle. In his room, Julius was practising the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Clio loved the music but Julius kept breaking off in the same bar, repeating a handful of phrases with his perfectionist’s concentration.

‘Your hair is prettier than mine,’ Grace said, breaking off from her humming. ‘It’s silkier. I’ll give it one hundred more brushes, and it will
shine.
’

Clio sighed languorously. She felt happier this evening than she had done since the beginning of the holiday. Jake and Grace had appeared separately during the game; they could have been together but she was sure they had not. Jake had looked ordinary, too, instead of always covertly peering at Grace and then glancing hastily away in case anyone noticed him doing it.

Grace herself had been friendly, perhaps a little quieter than usual. Clio thought that the atmosphere between them all was as it used to be, except that Julius watched what went on and said nothing.

The intimacy created by the storm and the hairbrushing and Grace’s humming made Clio feel bold, and she said, ‘I think it’s stupid, all the boy and girl business. Like you and Jake sighing and staring at each other. It spoils everything.’

There were two or three more brush strokes, and silence, while Grace seemed to consider. Then she laughed, putting the hairbrush down and leaning over Clio’s shoulder so that she could see their twin reflections in the mirror. ‘Do you know what? I think you’re right. It does spoil everything.’

In a month, since the Pitt-Rivers day, she had seen Jake change from the admirable leader and innovator she had hero-worshipped almost from babyhood into a duller, slower twin of himself. Jake blushed now, and hovered awkwardly, and tried to catch her in corners. She wanted to be admired and singled out and even kissed, but by the old glamorous Jake, not the new hesitant one. And then today, when he did catch her, he hadn’t acted as he was supposed to act. Grace wasn’t exactly sure how that was, except to do homage to her in some way, perhaps kneeling down, perhaps eloquently declaring that he would love her for ever, would go to the war and fight and die for her sake.

Instead he had frightened her, and she had frightened herself. She wasn’t supposed to feel like that, when he touched her
there
, was she? She had run away, run in real terror, back to the other children and the rules of the game.

It was cosy in Clio’s bedroom with the two white beds turned down and the night-light burning on the table between them. Clio would turn it out when they went to sleep, but for now it gave the room the look of the old night-nursery at Stretton.

Grace picked up the hairbrush again and began the long smooth strokes through her cousin’s hair. Clio looked pleased and Grace smiled over her shoulder at her reflection. ‘Look at us. We are alike, aren’t we?’

Clio did look, at Grace’s face behind her own, a pale moon in the dim room. The rain was still hammering down outside.

She said, ‘I don’t know. I suppose we are, a little.’

The same night, in bed listening to the rain, Jake repeated what he had done under the hawthorn hedge. The sensation was less surprising and so even more pleasurable, but it was the sense of calm and relief afterwards that affected him most strongly. He knew that he would sleep, and that images of Grace and Clio and even Blanche and Eleanor would not rise up to torment and reproach him. His bed felt soft and safe, like arms wrapped around him. He began to speculate drowsily about his own unpredictable body, quiescent at last, however temporarily. He realized that he knew almost nothing about what made it work, or why he had been obliged to suffer for a month, or why it was considered wrong or dangerous or wicked to do what he had just done, so simply and satisfyingly. He knew even less about Grace’s body, even though he had speculated furtively about it for so many leaden days. What did Grace feel, what did Grace know? He did feel ashamed that he had frightened her.

And yet, Jake thought, he knew Latin and classical Greek, and the planets of the solar system, and algebra and trigonometry, and the countries of the world and their rivers and mountains and principal exports. Why such ignorance about himself, his own insistent flesh and blood?

Just before he fell asleep, an idea came to him.

In the morning he found Nathaniel in the breakfast room,
The Times
folded beside his plate. They were the first members of the household to come down. Jake helped himself to ham and eggs from the silver dish on the sideboard and sat down beside his father. He ate hungrily, watching Nathaniel frowning over the news from Europe. Then he said, ‘May we discuss something, Pappy?’

Nathaniel put his newspaper aside. ‘Of course.’

‘I have been thinking about what I should do. It’s time I had an idea. Even Hugo knows that he wants to be a soldier.’

‘Even Hugo,’ Nathaniel agreed seriously.

‘I would like to study medicine. I should like to be a doctor.’

‘You have never talked about this before.’

‘I have been thinking. I know something about so many things, and nothing about myself. Anatomy, physiology, chemistry. It came to me that nothing would interest me more than to learn, and then to apply that knowledge. The world will need doctors. I could be a doctor, not a soldier.’

Nathaniel looked hard at him. He had been thinking that Jake had shaken off his preoccupation of the last weeks, regained his old animation. Whatever his problem had been with Grace, he must have found the answer to it. Nathaniel trusted his son enough to be certain that it was the right answer.

He said, ‘If you are serious, I think it is a fine idea. I will talk to the medical man at College.’

Jake beamed at him, as pleased as a small boy. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. He went back to the sideboard and mounded his plate with a second helping of ham and eggs.

Nathaniel turned back to his newspaper, but the grey print blurred. He was thinking about Julius and hoping that when his turn came for Grace’s attention, if it did come, he would deal with it as sensibly as Jake had done.

Four

Blanche followed her housekeeper through the
enfilade
of rooms that ran along the south front of Stretton. The long vista was dim because the shutters were closed. The few bright beams of sunshine that pierced the cracks and fell across their path seemed solid enough to trip her, much more solid than the furniture invisible and shapeless under its dust-covers. She stepped through one of the golden rods, and the finger of it ran over her face and then fell back over the floor behind her.

Blanche had flinched when the beam of sunlight touched her. She was thinking of Hugo, who had gone at last to join his regiment in France.

She knew that he would be killed, she knew it with unshakeable certainty, and when she thought of him, as now, the air itself seemed to bruise her with its weight of terror.

Blanche had to force herself to concentrate on Mrs Dixey’s broad back marching in front of her, to harness her thoughts to Stretton and these dim shuttered rooms. They were closing them up until the end of the war.

If the day ever comes, Blanche thought. And if I could close up the fear, as if it were the saloon or the yellow drawing room …

‘The china from these rooms is all packed in the chests now, my lady,’ the housekeeper said. ‘And stored in the billiard room, like you ordered.’

‘Very good,’ Blanche said automatically. The silver had been taken away to the security vaults, and the better pictures had been lifted down from the walls. There were darker rectangles on the faded silks and damasks, showing the places where generations of Strettons had stared down on their successors.

But in the saloon, the Sargent portrait still hung in its accustomed place. John Leominster himself had given the order for it to be left. ‘I like to know it’s there,’ he had said gruffly. ‘In the place where it belongs, even if nothing else is.’

Blanche had not asked him why, because to ask or answer such a question would not be part of their expectations of each other, but she guessed that he thought of it as a kind of talisman. Perhaps he attached some superstitious importance to it, imagining that the old, pre-war order it seemed to stand for would somehow exert its benign influence over Hugo’s fate.

She paused beneath the picture now, looking up into the innocent faces. As if it could, she thought bitterly. As if a society portrait of two silly girls could have any effect on Hugo in the trenches.

But even as she dismissed the picture she felt a wave of longing for the days it recalled, for the measured, orderly pre-war times that she was afraid were gone for ever. Her own bright painted face, and Eleanor’s mirror of it, seemed to belong to a different generation.

‘Not
this
portrait, you know,’ Clio had said once to Elizabeth Ainger, during one of her rambling monologues.

Elizabeth had barely glanced up at the picture that hung behind the old lady’s velvet chair. It was the work of a painter no longer very much admired, and she did not herself care for the violent expressionistic style. She knew the history of it, from family stories, and its title.
The Janus Face
. That was all.

‘I’m talking about the Sargent,’ Clio went on. ‘His portrait of Eleanor and Blanche.
The Misses Holborough
.’

‘I know,’ Elizabeth said. The Stretton family had sold the picture in the Fifties and it was now housed in a private collection in Baltimore. She had never seen the famous Sargent itself, only reproductions of it. She had suggested to her publishers that they might try to obtain permission to use the double portrait as a frontispiece for the book.

It was a pity, she thought, that the later picture, the one of Grace and Clio, was not more attractive or at least more celebrated.

‘This picture, the one of me and … and your grandmother, was intended to hang at Stretton alongside the other. But old John Leominster never liked it, and your …’

Clio paused and squinted sideways at Elizabeth, smiling a little. Elizabeth thought that she looked very old, and rather mad.

‘… the painter refused to sell it to him. He loaned it to my father, and there it stayed, in the Woodstock Road, for years and years.’

Clio’s head fell forward then, so that her chin seemed to touch her chest, and Elizabeth thought she might have fallen into one of her sudden sleeps. She could see the shape of her skull under the thin hair and paper skin, and she was touched with pity for her.

But then the skull-head jerked up again, and the surprisingly bright eyes flicked to her. ‘Such a lot of years, eh? Why are you interested in so much long-ago, forgotten nonsense?’