All My Sins Remembered (16 page)

‘Read it,’ she said in a low voice.

Afterwards Clio sat down beside Grace on the edge of the high bed. She was ashamed that amidst all her love for Jake, and fear for him, there was a shiver of jealousy that he should have written in such a way to Grace, not to herself, or Julius. And yet she understood that in the terrible hospital Jake needed to reach out to his ideal of whiteness and cleanliness, his smooth river pebble. That was not a family entity, and so Jake turned to what was closest to home, to Grace. So she told herself.

The two girls let their heads rest together, the smooth roll of hair and the thick plait the same colour and texture, side by side. They were still sitting in the same position when Julius found them. He took his place next to Grace, making the same arrangement as on the garden bench.

He still felt happy, remembering that he had kissed her.

The letter did not surprise Julius, neither the horror of it nor Jake’s image of Grace. His vivid imagination had led him closer to the reality of what Jake was suffering, and he loved Grace to the point where he would have been more surprised to find that his brother did not.

It did not occur to Julius to feel jealous.

‘I wish he would come home,’ Clio said savagely.

‘He will, and Hugo,’ Grace promised. ‘Everything will start again. We’ll make it.’

When Eleanor came up, the letter was hidden in the folds of Clio’s dress. All three of them knew that it was for the magic circle alone. They felt that for even Eleanor to see it would be a betrayal.

That night, although she had not had the nightmare for years, Grace dreamt of her own death by drowning.

Five

The turret room was growing familiar. As he lay in bed the soldier had learnt the contour of it, the regular square of one side and then the hemispherical opposite bulge where the tower was grafted on to the red brick absurdity of the house.

He had looked up at the turret, blinking his sore eyes at the white winter sky, when they wheeled him into the house from the ambulance. Since he had been brought home from Cambrai he had seen nothing but the rigid lines of the hospital ward, and this apparition of a house with its crenellations and gables had made him momentarily afraid of hallucinations again. He had gripped the wooden arms of the wheelchair and found them solid, and had looked again to see that the house was solid too, an architect’s fantasy castle planted in the North Oxford street. There were bare-branched cherry trees in the front garden, and a child’s discarded wooden engine beside the path.

As they lifted him up the steps a woman had come out to greet him. She was statuesque, dressed in a plain grey afternoon dress, with her coils of dark hair put up in the pre-war fashion.

‘I am Eleanor Hirsh,’ she said, smiling at him. When she held out her hand it was as if they were being introduced in a London drawing room. After the months in the trenches and the indignities of hospital, the simple gesture was like a benediction. When he took her hand he saw that there were no rings except for a thin wedding band and a small diamond, and that the fingers looked as if they were accustomed to harder work than writing invitation cards.

‘And you are Captain Dennis.’

Peter Dennis forgot, momentarily, that he was in a wheelchair with his head bandaged and all his senses dislocated. He made a little bow from the waist that was almost courtly.

‘Welcome to my house,’ Eleanor said.

The nurses and the driver who had come with him from the hospital half pushed and half carried his chair up into the house. There was another nurse here, and Peter Dennis had a confused impression of a dark-brown hallway, many more stairs and passages, children’s faces solemnly watching him, all blurred by renewed pain as he was lifted out of the wheelchair and carried up to the turret room.

He heard that his attendants called the dark-haired woman Madam or Mrs Hirsh, but that the children’s voices rising up through the house cried ‘Mama …’

The room they put him into was blessedly quiet, and filled with the reflections of light from the pointed windows in the turret. The new nurse helped him into the high iron-framed bed and he lay back against the down pillows and closed his eyes.

Eleanor took Tabby and Alice down to the kitchen with her. ‘You mustn’t make too much noise,’ she told them. ‘Captain Dennis has been very ill, and now he will need to rest quietly.’

‘May we go and see him?’ Tabby asked. ‘I could show him my sewing.’

‘Perhaps, in a day or so.’

‘Did a German shoot him, as well?’ Alice demanded. It was her standard question.

‘Captain Dennis was very brave. He was fighting to defend what he believes in, and he was wounded. But the German soldier who fired at him was probably just as brave, and defending his own in the same way.’

It was a variation on Eleanor’s standard reply. With her own pacifist sons, her husband’s German blood and the male Strettons’ fierce jingoism to reconcile, she felt it was the best she could do.

‘Like Hugo?’

‘Yes, of course, like Hugo,’ Eleanor answered. That was safer ground. She did not object, for once, to Cook handing out iced biscuits to the little girls. They took their prizes and ran out into the garden before Eleanor could change her mind.

Eleanor instructed Cook that the driver and the nurses who had accompanied the ambulance would probably require tea before returning to the hospital. Then she saw that Mrs Doyle had already put the kettle on the hot plate of the big black range. The kettle sighed and a wisp of steam issued from the curved spout. Eleanor nodded her satisfaction, and the two women smiled at each other. Their relationship was unconventional, but Eleanor did not run a conventional household.

Mrs Doyle had been widowed in the first year of the war and had left her husband’s Oxfordshire village shortly afterwards to return to service. Before her marriage she had been employed as a parlourmaid in a great house, and had no experience in the kitchen. But Eleanor had lost a series of cooks who could not adapt to Madam’s haphazard housekeeping, and she was glad to offer the post to the capable-looking Mrs Doyle. Her instincts were correct. Mrs Doyle proved herself to be a naturally talented cook, producing the sweet cakes and pastries that Nathaniel loved as well as economical ragouts and vegetable pies, and managing to direct the shopping and weekly menus for the family whilst giving the impression that Eleanor was really in charge. Everyone ate much better food, and a new state of calm overtook the household.

The secret of their relationship was not a secret between the two women. They felt a comfortable and open respect for one another, and as the war continued they also became friends. Mrs Doyle’s dependability freed Eleanor to concentrate on her convalescent nursing work, and as the time passed the Woodstock Road house became less a rest home than a hospital extension.

By the beginning of 1918 the flow of casualties was so relentless that there were never enough hospital beds available. Eleanor and Nathaniel had begun to accept into the house men who were still seriously ill, simply because their taking a man who could be nursed at home meant that a bed was freed for another who could not.

One trained and one volunteer nurse now came to the Woodstock Road every eight hours, in shifts around the clock, but it was still Eleanor who took responsibility for the recovery of her patients. They did recover, almost all of them had done, some with a rapidity that surprised the doctors.

‘You should have been a professional nurse,’ Nathaniel proudly told his wife. ‘You have a great gift for it.’

‘Can you imagine my dear mama countenancing anything so dreary and dangerous? Permitting her daughters to do any work at all, however genteel?’ Eleanor sounded cheerful, but she was touched by a wistful sense of opportunity missed, of an unexperienced life running parallel to her own that she could only imagine, never know for sure. She consoled herself with the fact that she was doing what she could, now that it was needed, although it seemed so little.

Nathaniel had laughed and refolded his newspaper. ‘I can
not
imagine,’ he had said.

Eleanor and Mrs Doyle now had enough experience of both nurses and ambulance drivers to know that they needed tea, and slabs of cake as well. Mrs Doyle set out the plain white kitchen cups and cut a cherry cake into symmetrical pieces, and Eleanor welcomed Captain Dennis’s escorts into the kitchen.

‘Is he comfortably settled?’

‘The journey’s taken it out of him, all right,’ one of the nurses said. ‘But I reckon he’ll do well enough when he’s rested himself.’ There was no ‘madam’. She spoke with a brusquely businesslike air, one professional to another. Eleanor noticed it and felt a mild satisfaction. Only Mrs Doyle frowned and held up the big brown teapot as if to threaten the woman with it.

‘Won’t you sit down, if you have time?’ Eleanor invited.

They settled themselves around the scrubbed table, and Eleanor sat down with them. She took a cup of tea from Mrs Doyle and paid her a joking compliment about the even distribution of the cherries in the sponge. Only the driver stared and looked uncomfortable, but he was the only one who had never been to the Woodstock Road before.

The nurses talked about patients and their prospects. Eleanor stayed just long enough to drink her tea, and then she said a smiling goodbye and went off upstairs to see if her newest patient was comfortable.

‘She’s the lady of the house, is she?’ the driver sniffed. ‘Funny sort of a set-up you’ve got here, the mistress sitting drinking tea with our sort, isn’t it?’

‘More of a lady than you’re ever likely to encounter,’ the cook snapped. ‘And a finer household, too.’

The man appeared not to have heard her. He rubbed his whiskers with the palm of his hand. ‘It’s the war, isn’t it? Changing everything, all the old ways.’ He shook his head lugubriously, ready to insist that no change he had ever experienced had ever been for the better.

Nathaniel came out of the Examination Schools and began to walk up the honey-walled curve of the High. He had been lecturing on Old French vowel-shifts and his mind was still busy with the fascinating labyrinths of word-formations and Germanic borrowings. It was the middle of the afternoon and Oxford was at its busiest, but Nathaniel was oblivious to the cyclists who swept past with their gowns fluttering, the tradesmen’s vans and carts and omnibuses and private cars that clogged the road, and even the fellow dons who passed in the opposite direction and glanced at him in the expectation of a greeting. He had forgotten to button up his overcoat and it flapped around his legs as he walked, but Nathaniel didn’t notice the cold wind either.

If he had stopped to look around him it would have been to notice, with the same sadness even though it was for the thousandth time, that the faces of the undergraduates who swept by him were either too young, no more than boys, or else they were much older, and shadowed with experience. There were only one or two young men of the right age, and they were in khaki uniforms.

Still preoccupied with his own thoughts, Nathaniel passed the golden front of Queen’s and hurried on, intending to cross Radcliffe Square in the direction of the Bodleian. But when he reached the corner of Catte Street he had to wait to allow a brewer’s dray to pass ahead of him, and while he stood hesitating something made him look sideways, across the High.

Through the traffic he saw two young women. They were balanced on the edge of the kerb, one of them leaning on a bicycle, the other carrying a shopping basket. They were laughing, their heads held close together, and their rosy faces were bright with happiness. They looked very alike.

His first response was abstract admiration. An instant later he thought of Eleanor and Blanche, with their lifelong conspiracy of friendship. These two reminded him of the older twins. And only then, emerging from his preoccupation, did he see that the two were not strangers at all, but Clio and Grace.

He realized with a little shock that they were grown up, not children any longer. And as soon as the pair of faces dissolved into familiarity he lost the sense of how similar they were.

Clio was wearing her school coat and a dark felt hat with a coloured ribbon, and her schoolbag was fastened to the front of her bicycle handlebars. Eleanor allowed her to cycle to school now, because Clio insisted that all the other girls did. By contrast, Grace wore one of the well-tailored suits that Blanche’s dressmaker made for her. From somewhere, probably her mother’s wardrobe, she had purloined a fur tippet and cut it up to make a turban. The fur made a dark cloud around her face. The shopping basket was an incongruous accessory. It looked very heavy.

Nathaniel changed course and ducked through the passing traffic to greet them. They swung round at once with pleased cries of ‘Pappy!’ and ‘Uncle Nathaniel!’

‘What’s the joke about?’ he asked, wanting instinctively to be a part of it. The girls looked blankly at him.

‘I don’t think there was a joke, really,’ Grace answered. ‘We were just laughing. I’ve been to the Lending Library. Look.’ The basket was full of books. It was one of Grace’s responsibilities to select novels for the patients. She chose out of the depths of her ignorance, with results that varied from inspired to comical.

Nathaniel tilted his head to one side to read the titles on the spines. ‘
Martin Chuzzlewit
, mmm, mmm,
Zuleika Dobson
. That’s interesting. All very suitable. And where are the two of you going now?’

‘Home. Unless we can come with you? Out to tea?’

Nathaniel had been planning to do some work in his rooms, but the idea of tea was tempting.

Clio begged, ‘Please, pappy? Tea at Tripps’? You know it’s meatless day today. That means vegetable sausage for dinner, doesn’t it?’

The Hirsh household always obeyed the government’s edict for helping with food shortages by doing without meat on at least two days a week. But even Mrs Doyle’s version of the invariable vegetable sausage was no great favourite.

‘Tripps’ it is,’ Nathaniel said briskly.

The tea-shop on the corner of the Broad was an old favourite. Nathaniel had first taken Eleanor there long ago, before Jake was born. The crooked floors of the little rooms and the dark oak furniture and faded yellowish walls seemed exactly as they had always been; the difference was that the cakes were brought by waitresses in caps and aprons, whereas there had once been waiters like family retainers in dark jackets with white napkins folded over their arms.