All My Sins Remembered (25 page)

‘Don’t be. Be brutal and intransigent.’

‘Instead of you? All right, then. We will walk on to the water, because that is what I would like to do.’

‘Is that the best brutality you can manage?’

‘Yes, for the moment.’

They turned towards the Serpentine, a flat sheet of silver visible through the trees. Grace sighed. ‘I’m so bored with the Park and Belgrave Square and shopping and dinners.’

‘How is the portrait progressing?’

She faltered. It was like Anthony to make the immediate connection between her proclaimed boredom and the reason why she was prepared to suffer it.

‘Pilgrim seems satisfied. I haven’t been granted a viewing yet.’

That was almost a relief. As long as it was unseen, they could hope that it would somehow turn out to be the innocent celebration of their début that Blanche expected.

Pilgrim did not show any anxiety to finish the portrait. Twice now he had invited the girls for separate sittings, claiming that he felt outnumbered by the two of them together. They had not felt it necessary to mention this new arrangement to Blanche.

For the first of Grace’s solo sessions he had worked in frowning silence, making her wonder if she had said or done something wrong. But at the second he had been jovial, and had made only a brief dab at his easel before throwing its calico shroud back over the canvas. Grace was relieved to find that he was in good humour, and happy not to have to hold the familiar pose for another hour.

‘I can’t work every day,’ Pilgrim smiled at her. He came and sat beside her on the divan, briefly rubbing her cheek with his forefinger. Grace was beginning to be used to the way that Pilgrim and his friends touched each other. They kissed and embraced the way her parents shook hands.

Pilgrim brought them a glass of wine, and they smoked his yellow French cigarettes while they talked. Grace had met enough of the people who frequented the Eiffel to enjoy Pilgrim’s gossip about their affairs.

The pictures of Jeannie still faced into the room. When she looked away from Pilgrim and saw them confronting her she felt uncomfortable, aware of a prickle beneath her skin. The pictures were erotic. There was a majestic calm in Jeannie’s nakedness that mocked her own fiddly attention to her shreds of covering. With part of herself, Grace wished for the simplicity of bare skin. It would be easier to be naked. And Pilgrim had painted Jeannie’s flesh with such attention, with such a heavy impasto of cream and coral and bronze that Grace wanted to reach out and touch the crusts of paint. But another part of her flushed at the mere thought, and dragged her eyes back to Pilgrim’s face.

She saw that he was watching her. His lips were very red, shiny with wine, and his eyes glittered.

‘I’m sorry to say,’ he whispered, ‘that it is time for my next sitting.’ He leant forward and kissed the hollow at the side of her throat.

Grace leapt like a rabbit, relieved and disappointed.

Yet for all her confusion, she had not wanted her sitting to end with Pilgrim at an advantage. When she was dressed in her street clothes she had crossed back to where he was still sitting, smoking. She reached down, until her eyes were level with his. She liked his aroma of paint and tobacco overlying another musky scent that she could only identify as the natural smell of his skin. He examined her, at these close quarters, with frank approval.

‘When can I see the picture?’ Grace asked.

‘When I have finished it.’

‘Are you pleased with it?’

He was silent for a second. Then he said, ‘I believe it is my masterpiece.’

Grace felt her skin prickle for the second time. Slowly, as if his stare had hypnotized her, she leant closer until her top lip grazed his. Pilgrim smiled. His face was so near to hers that she couldn’t see the expression in his eyes, only the granulation of colour in his irises. ‘Your masterpiece,’ she whispered back.

Their mouths were still touching when Pilgrim repeated, ‘It’s time for my next sitting.’

Grace stood up and drew on her kid gloves. Blanche’s chauffeur was waiting for her downstairs with the car.

When Grace asked Clio what happened at her corresponding sittings, Clio only said, ‘He talks a great deal. About art, mostly.’

Grace wondered if that was the truth.

Remembering all this, Grace’s impatience with Anthony and their stately progress swelled until she was sure that it would choke her. Her arms swung stiffly and her feet clapped on the dusty path.

‘Shall we walk a little faster?’ Anthony asked mildly. Grace lengthened her stride and he matched it, then Grace walked faster still, and faster, recognizing her own contrariness and taking perverse pride in it. Anthony kept pace with her until at last Grace was running, with her head down and the silver foxtails of her wrap flying behind her.

Grace ran, the uncomfortable drumming of her blood finding an echo at last in her thudding feet. She was oblivious to the stares of the other walkers with their dogs and their sticks, and their heads turning to follow her as she passed. Anthony loped beside her. He could outrun her; she would never shake him off.

They came to the water’s edge. The Serpentine lay in front of them, the grey surface broken now by ripples licked up by the wind. In the distance Grace could hear another echo, the hoofbeats of horses cantering in the Row. She was gasping for breath and there were tears in her eyes from the cold.

‘You don’t want to sprint on to Oxford Street?’ Anthony inquired. His breathing was quite even. He held out his handkerchief so that she could wipe her eyes. Grace took it without a word. He watched her, seeing how the silver-tipped fox hairs stuck to her damp cheeks. She was looking away from him, across the grass to some benches under the trees. A group of nannies was gathered there with their high perambulators. There was one toddler with them, buttoned into leggings and leading reins. He strained at the end of the padded leash and the bells on the leather front of it jingled as he tried to lurch towards the moving water. But his nanny would never let him out of the corral of perambulators. At last he flopped down on to the grass and let out a howl of frustration.

Grace screwed Anthony’s handkerchief up into a ball and thrust it back at him. She turned away and began to walk again. ‘Don’t you ever feel that you want to run away? All the way away, out of sight of everyone?’

Anthony said, ‘Of course I do. We can run away together, you know. Grace, why don’t you marry me?’

He loved her, he knew that. He also understood her bewildered boredom. If they were married, he thought, he could divert her. They would work together. They would make a political partnership.

Pityingly, Grace shook her head. ‘Marrying you wouldn’t be running away. It would be running
into
it all. Full tilt.’

She was thinking about Charlotte Street and the Eiffel Tower, and the merry, unplanned, Bohemian lives that Pilgrim and his friends lived. She did not share Clio’s half-awed esteem for their art, and the endless discussions of theories and ideals bored her as much as they fascinated Clio. What Grace liked was the vivid, reckless manner of life in the studios and pubs, and she wanted to be a freelance part of it. She wanted to slip into it, and out of Belgrave Square, whenever it suited her. It was partly that duality which attracted her. She was drawn to the same quality in Pilgrim himself. Part of her knew that her painter was devious, lazy and probably a liar. But he was also new, and different, and powerfully exciting.

Grace liked to be Lady Grace Stretton of Leominster House, Belgrave Square, and at the same time she liked to submerge herself in the brew of the Eiffel. It was like being two people, at once significant and anonymous.

The thought reminded her of Peter Dennis. It all seemed very long ago. How babyish she had been, with her unsureness of herself and her envy of Clio.

‘I can’t marry you, Anthony. I can’t marry anyone for a long time yet.’

There would be a time for all that, in the end, in a distant future she couldn’t even be bothered to imagine.

‘I’ll wait,’ Anthony repeated.

Grace put her arm through his. The running had burnt away some of her gnawing energy and made her forget her ill-humour. ‘Better not,’ she said kindly. ‘Why don’t you marry Clio? She likes you, and she would make a good wife.’

Freedom, they had pledged each other on the night of their dance. Modern women. But Grace did not believe that Clio was truly dedicated to independence. Grace guessed that for all her bluestocking pretensions Clio would be happy enough to marry and to have a brood of children just as Eleanor had done.

‘I like Clio. And she will be an excellent wife, but not for me.’

Anthony believed that Clio was too much like himself. She was reasonable and prudent and conscientious, whereas Grace was none of those things. ‘It’s you I intend to marry.’

‘Poor Anthony,’ was all Grace would say.

The light was fading. They retraced their steps across the Park and back to Leominster House. Anthony was to stay to dine and then to accompany the Stretton family party to the opera. Blanche had adopted him as her daughter’s unofficial suitor, a suitable temporary holder of the post until the right duke or marquis should present himself. She was always inviting Anthony to dine, or to accompany them here and there.

‘But darling, he is a kind of cousin of ours,’ she murmured when Grace protested. ‘Of course we must invite him. You can’t possibly mind that.’ And Grace, whose main objection to Anthony was that he was unobjectionable, could only sigh and submit to his company.

The opera was
The Magic Flute
, supposedly a favourite of John Leominster’s. Clio sat in the Strettons’ box, leaning her chin on her white glove, and looked down into the coloured sea of the stalls. She was thinking of her own father’s passion for Wagner, played on the wind-up gramophone in the cluttered room overlooking the garden in the Woodstock Road. Music had been one of the languages of her late childhood. Nathaniel would never allow whispering while music was being played, even a recording. Tonight, from the overture onwards, the Strettons would murmur to each other and point out their friends and acquaintances in the other boxes.

Clio jumped when someone touched her shoulder. She looked up to see Julius, handsome in his evening clothes. Blanche had invited him to join the party. She had not extended the invitation to Jake, knowing that he would not come.

‘I was just thinking about Pappy,’ Clio said.

‘Wagner.’ Julius smiled. They were fond of their aunt and uncle, particularly of Blanche, but they made their quiet affirmation to each other that they were Hirshes, not Strettons.

Julius shook hands with Anthony and then sat down in the sixth red-brocaded chair just behind Clio’s shoulder. Clio resumed her inspection of the crowd beneath.

‘Look,’ Grace said, and pointed with her gloved finger.

There was a disturbance in the centre of the stalls. A quartet of people had come noisily in and were threading their way to their seats. Heads turned to look at them and craned in their wake. There was an impression of odd clothes and raised voices.

‘Pilgrim.’

It was Pilgrim in an immense rusty-black opera cape, and John with his curling beard spread over a crimson velvet coat and his brass earrings glinting in the lights. Their companions were Jeannie, in some outlandish collection of purple drapes, and a young girl. The girl had bizarrely cropped silvery-gilt hair and she was wearing what looked like a man’s frock coat. Clio and Grace recognized simultaneously that she was extremely beautiful. They had no objection to Jeannie, she was part of the retinue, always present, but as soon as they saw the stranger they were jealous. Pilgrim was theirs. He did not belong in the stalls at the opera with somebody else. They did not look at each other. They leant forward, on either side of Blanche, for a better view.

John Leominster raised his opera glasses. ‘That’s your painter? Good God. What an extraordinary-looking fellow.’

Pilgrim had been examining the occupants of the boxes ranged above him. He saw the Strettons now, and his companions followed his gaze. The painters bowed extravagantly in the confined space of the stalls, making a swirl of capes and hair and setting up new ripples of interest all around them. Blanche gave a stiff nod in return.

Jeannie had caught sight of Julius. She lifted both her hands to her lips, kissed them, and blew. Her purple robes and raised arms made her look like the high priestess of some religious cult.

Grace was laughing. She admired the careless spectacle that Pilgrim made and she was happy to receive his public tribute. She was also happy to be sitting up in her father’s box, the focus of attention of all the stalls and the boxes opposite. She waved back at Pilgrim, an elegant flutter of her gloved hand.

Clio ducked her head. She didn’t smile because she was mortified to be exposed in the gilt and plush box. She felt the stiff arrangement of their family party, all of them in a row on their red and gold chairs, pinned in their places like butterflies in a case. It was as if they were specimens of their class and position, pleased with their niche and happy to have it spotlit for the audience. They were frozen in their time and place, unchangeable, chloroformed by convention. She longed to be able to creep out of the little door behind her and vanish, but she couldn’t move, any more than a dead butterfly could. She could almost feel the jab of the pin through her thorax.

Anthony leant towards Julius. ‘Who is the astonishing redhead, Hirsh?’

Julius looked uncomfortable. ‘I hardly know her. She has digs in the same house as me, just across the landing.’

‘And the silvery one? Is she one of your girls too?’

Grace was giggling.

Julius said, ‘I’ve never seen her before. And Jeannie isn’t one of my girls.’

John turned round, rigid with disapproval. ‘What a vile-looking crew of people they are. Can’t you find any decent friends among your own kind? I thought you were a violinist, Julius.’

‘I am a violinist.’

Grace and Clio did exchange glances then. Their jealousy of the new girl divided rather than united them, with their rivalrous claims on Pilgrim and his world. But they felt the same response to Lord Leominster’s blinkered condemnation. Pilgrim and his friends were not vile at all. They were rebellious and anarchic and everything that was attractive. At that moment Grace and Clio would willingly have changed places with Jeannie and the silver girl, if only they could.