All My Sins Remembered (14 page)

‘Why am I so lucky?’ Clio asked, still smiling. ‘I’ve got three pages of French translation to do, and an essay on Robespierre, and there’s an ink stain in the front of the skirt of my good dress.’

‘You’re a Hirsh, and a twin,’ Grace answered seriously.

They both knew how impossible such an acknowledgement would have been only a few months ago.

Clio slid sideways on the garden bench, drawing up her serge skirt to make room, and held out her hand to Grace.

‘You’re a Stretton.
Sursum corda
,’ she said. ‘Lift up your hearts’ was the Stretton family motto, and the cousins considered it appropriately Culmington. ‘And you
are
a twin.’

Julius had put his book down and he moved to one side too as Grace sat between them. He put his arm across her shoulder and Grace leant back, resting her head against the sleeve of his coat. She sighed, and then turned her face so that she could look up at him.

‘Am I, Julius?’

Julius contemplated the sheen of her pale skin, and the fine hairs at the tail end of her eyebrow, and the small vertical cleft beneath her lower lip that she had inherited from her father, and he knew that he loved her as much as he loved Clio, and that she filled a space in his life that was not sisterly at all, but much more intriguing and enchanting. He could not remember even how long he had loved her, but he knew the roots of it went a long way back, and deep within him, and that the love was very important to him, but it carried no sense of threat because he knew it was immutable.

‘Is that really what you want to be?’ he asked her, teasingly, because that was the language they used with one another.

Grace said, ‘Yes.’

‘Then consider it a fact,’ Julius told her.

‘Thank you.’ She lifted her head and kissed him on the cheek. Being physically close to Julius always made Grace feel happy. There was a wholesomeness about him that she liked very much. His olive-coloured skin smelt good, and he gave and received kisses and hugs quite naturally, as if they were a matter of course.

Jake did not, she remembered. Jake jumped and started as if something hurt him, and then he clutched with overheated hands and frightened her. When she was not frightened she recognized an avid, beseeching kind of eagerness in him. It embarrassed her, and made her want to laugh, and that was not what he wanted from her at all.

Jake and Grace had not seen very much of one another since the summer at the beginning of the war, and when they had met they had ignored the few opportunities of being alone together, as if by mutual agreement.

And yet, since he had been at the hospital in France, Jake had written to her three or four times. They were extraordinary letters that didn’t seem to speak with Jake’s familiar voice. Grace kept them tied with a piece of braid in a pocket of her writing case. She did not take them out to reread when a new letter came, but quickly undid the braid and then fastened it up again.

Grace kissed Clio too, and then sat back with satisfaction between the two of them. It was comfortable with Julius’s arm around her, and with Clio on the other side, companionable instead of challenging.

I was lonely, Grace thought, and now I’m not lonely. She felt sleepily grateful to Clio and Julius.

Clio picked up her book again. ‘May I finish my French, please?’

It was the middle of October and the lawns and flowerbeds were overlaid with a brown mosaic of fallen leaves, but the bench was sheltered by a high wall of red brick and the afternoon sun was warm. For once, Grace felt glad that there was nothing else to do but sit here, resting her head against Julius’s shoulder.

At the beginning of her visit, wanting to prove her good intentions, Grace had repeated her suggestion that she might perhaps accompany Clio to her day school in Oxford. But most of the girls were the studious daughters of dons, and Grace had seen at once from the reactions of Nathaniel and Clio herself that she would be hopelessly out of her depth in a class with her own age group. She had no desire to be relegated to studying with the twelve-year-olds, and so she added quickly, ‘But my father might not want that, and perhaps I could do something here for Aunt Eleanor that would be more useful than mathematics?’

‘Nothing is more useful than mathematics, except possibly Latin,’ Nathaniel had said severely. But the Hirshes had agreed that Grace would be a valuable assistant for Eleanor in looking after the convalescents. Lately it had become her job to lay trays and to hurry upstairs with them, to cut up food and to carry hot water in jugs, and to do whatever she could to save her aunt’s legs and the energies of the overworked housemaids.

The men liked Grace, although she did not find it easy to be relaxed and happy with them and to forget what they had suffered, as Clio seemed able to do.

The middle of the afternoon, once the luncheon trays had been cleared away, was the quiet part of the day. The convalescents were sleeping, or reading, and even Tabby and Alice were resting.

It was good, Grace reflected, to be busy enough to find a break in the afternoon sunshine so welcome.

Julius stirred beside her. ‘Are you asleep?’ he whispered.

‘No. Just thinking.’

Of all Grace’s moods and humours, and he could have listed a score without any effort, Julius liked her contemplative manner best. He felt closest to her then, as if they could exchange ideas without words, across some invisible membrane. ‘Serious thoughts?’

She smiled at once, skimming away from him. ‘Not very. Not at all.’

Clio jammed her fingers into her ears and hunched closer over her textbook. ‘I’m trying to work.
Please
.’

Julius lifted his arm from Grace’s shoulders, yawned, and stretched his long legs. ‘And I have to go and practise.’

Grace said, ‘May I come and listen?’ She liked to be the audience, sitting silently through the music and applauding when he reached the end of a piece. Sometimes Julius played to his audience of one, tucking his violin under his arm and making a deep bow, and sometimes he lost himself in the music and forgot her altogether.

‘You certainly may,’ Clio answered for him, and Julius and Grace laughed and walked back through the garden to the house.

Julius’s room was bare, like a monk’s cell. The papers and sheets of music on his table were laid in neat piles and squared off at right angles to each other. The covers on the iron-framed bed were drawn up with the same geometric precision. The only ornament was an engraving of the head of Mozart hanging on the wall next to the window.

Grace hesitated between the smooth bed and the upright chair in a corner, and opted for the chair. She sat down, straight-backed, and folded her hands in her lap.

Julius lifted his violin and tucked it beneath his chin. Grace saw how it became part of him. With the tip of his bow he indicated the sheet music on the music stand. ‘The
Rondo Capriccioso
, Camille Saint-Saëns,’ he announced formally. And then he added, ‘It’s rather difficult, in parts.’

It was one of the pieces his teacher had recommended he work up for his Royal College audition. The flying staccato run in E major still made him feel sweaty when he thought of it. ‘It calls for practice, Julius,’ his teacher had advised him. He took a breath now and lifted his bow.

Grace listened, intently at first, but then her attention began to wander. There was a fast section, where the notes seemed to climb and tumble over each other, and each time he played it Grace was sure that this time Julius would be satisfied with it and move on. But each time he broke off and jerked his bow away from the strings, closed his eyes to refocus his attention, and then began again, over and over.

Grace could not even hear what it was that displeased him.

She would have been incapable of such perfectionism herself. All her own instincts would have led her to scramble through the awkward passage somehow, anyhow, and then to hurry on, aiming for the end in one triumphant rush.

Julius stopped yet again, and patiently began one more time. He had forgotten she was there. She watched his face with its shuttered look of intense concentration.

She knew that Clio’s schoolfriends considered Julius to be handsome, and she had agreed with their judgement without giving it very much thought. Now, as she studied him with detachment through the skein of music, she noticed that he had heavy rounded eyelids that looked as if they might have been sculpted and a deep upper lip with a strongly defined margin, and that his perfectly harmonious features were more feminine than conventionally handsome. He looked like Clio, of course. And so there was much more than an echo of her own face in Julius’s. She had known it, but now she catalogued the similarities as if she had never been aware of them before, the colour of eyes and skin, the shape of mouth and ears and the height of cheekbones. Grace smiled faintly.

The music flowed on. This time, she realized, there was no stopping. The log jam of tumbling notes broke up and was carried away in the stream of the melody. Grace found herself leaning forward on her hard chair and willing him on, holding her breath for him as if it would help him to reach the release at the end of the piece.

The music swelled, filling her head and the bare room until she sat on the edge of her seat, her lips apart and her eyes fixed on Julius’s blind absorbed face. The echo of the last chord vibrated in the stillness before she realized it was finished, and then Julius raised his head and she saw his shining eyes. He was panting for breath.

‘Bravo,’ Grace shouted. She jumped off the chair and clapped her hands until the bones jarred. ‘Julius, bravo. That was wonderful.’

He nested his violin carefully in its case, then straightened up again. ‘It was better, anyway,’ he gasped.

‘No,’ Grace said seriously. ‘It was wonderful.’ She meant it, and he heard it in her voice, and he crooked his arm around her shoulders again.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Empty of the music, the room seemed very silent. They stood side by side, next to the window, looking down into the garden. Clio’s bent head was visible beneath the walnut tree at the far end, and beyond her were the trees of other gardens with bare branches beginning to poke through their faded summer covering, and the gables and slate roofs and brick chimneys of North Oxford. Grace liked the domesticity of this view, after the emptiness of Stretton Park and the grimy, pompous expanse of Belgrave Square. It amused her to imagine the blameless academic lives that were lived behind all the blandly shining windows.

Julius had no attention to spare for the view. He was too conscious of Grace’s warm shoulder and arm beneath his own. He had grown rapidly in the last year – he was taller even than Jake now – and he stood a head higher than Clio and Grace. Grace seemed very slight and fragile next to his own lumbering bulk. He turned his head very slightly, breathlessly, so that he could look down on the top of her dark head. Clio still wore her hair in a long plait that hung down her back, but Grace had put her hair up in a shiny, smooth roll that showed her ears. He could see the pink rim of her ear now, and the whiteness of her neck in the shadow of her blouse collar.

He felt a spasm of tenderness for her, and at the same time a startling, fierce determination that he would never allow anything to hurt her.

He moved round so that he stood in front of her, blocking out the vista of trees and rooftops. Grace looked up at him, her mouth opening a little, surprised but unafraid.

Julius wanted to take her face between his hands and hold it, so that he could study all the contours of it, but he felt too clumsy to trust himself. Instead he bent forward, slowly and stiffly, and kissed the corner of her mouth.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, afterwards.

‘I know it is,’ Grace answered. She was at ease with Julius. She didn’t feel any of the fear or fascination that Jake had set off inside her two summers ago. Julius was safe. His smooth skin smelt faintly of honey, she identified it now. He carried an aura of cleanliness with him. She knew that he loved her, and she loved him back, a love with clearly defined parameters.

Julius blushed. He was suffused with happiness that made him feel weak and light-headed, but he also felt quite calm and secure. There was no rush, no cause for anxiety. Grace was here, and there was plenty of time. If he had made himself analyse it he would not have been able to define what exactly there was time for, now or in the mysterious future, but the rush of happiness defeated logic. He wanted to lift Grace up in his arms and swing her round, laughing and shouting, but the knowledge of his own clumsiness restrained him again. Instead he reached out and touched her shoulder, near where the collar of her blouse folded against her throat. Immediately all the sensation in his body concentrated itself in his fingertips. The fabric semed ethereally soft, as if it might melt under his touch. He shook his head, slowly, in amazement.

Grace reached up and took his hand. She turned him gently so that they faced the window again, and then settled herself against him, in the crook of his arm. To Julius, the gesture seemed wonderfully natural and confiding. He held her and they went on looking out at the view together.

He didn’t know how long it was they stood there, but it seemed a long time.

At last, they heard Tabby running down the linoleum corridor outside the door. She was calling for Eleanor, and there was a clatter as she jumped three steps in the angle of the passage and skidded along the slippery stretch to the nursery. Another door slammed somewhere else in the house, and Grace and Julius remembered that they were not the only people in the world.

Grace stepped to one side and put her hands up to her hair, smoothing it where it was already smooth. Julius loved the womanly economy of the gesture. He was thinking, I will remember this, the look of her, the way she is outlined in the light against the window.

‘I must go and help Aunt Eleanor,’ she said.

Julius watched her go, and watched the door for a long moment after it had closed behind her. Then he picked up his violin again. He could play the Rondo now, he wasn’t afraid of it any longer.