All My Sins Remembered (29 page)

At last, Alice fell asleep on the sofa with her best dress rucked up to reveal her white stockings. Eleanor was serving coffee, and the dancing slowed and then stopped. Julius and the others put down their instruments.

Grace was standing alone at one side of the room, under
The Janus Face
. Jake and Julius both went to her, both of them glancing up at the semi-naked figures above them with their straining muscles emerging from the common bud of flesh. Clio was drawn closer too, unwillingly, but by some inescapable compulsion. Grace waited until they made a ring around her.

‘The magic circle,’ she said slowly. ‘Let’s go upstairs to the old nursery. It’s so noisy down here.’

She led the way, and the others followed her. Clio’s feet were heavier than lead. What self-dramatizing instinct, she wondered, was prompting Grace to draw them all out of the heart of the party?

The old nursery belonged to Tabby and Alice now. The paper remains of streamer and garland-making still spread out on the deal table. Grace sat on the old-fashioned high fender and looked down into the embers of the fire.

‘We should have brought up some wine,’ Jake said cheerfully. ‘We could have had our own party.’ He had enjoyed the evening. Several of Nathaniel’s old colleagues had pretty daughters, and the dancing had given him plenty of opportunities for whispered flirtation.

Grace did not look up. She was still staring down into the glowing coals when she made her flat-voiced announcement.

‘I think I am going to have a baby.’

The words seemed to echo in the corners of the room.

Julius sat still, frozen into silence. Clio could only think, stupidly, But you can’t. You have to be married first.

It was Jake who went to her. He bent down on one knee and took both her hands in his. When he looked up at her, it was as if he were parodying a proposal.

‘How many days late are you?’ he asked gently.

To his shame, Julius found that he was blushing scarlet at the mention of such things to his cousin and his sister.

‘Fifteen,’ Grace said, in the same flat voice.

‘That isn’t so long,’ Jake told her. ‘It might not be what you are afraid of. There could be all kinds of other reasons. Overtiredness, or anaemia, or anxiety.’

‘No. I know what it is. I can feel it.’

There had only been half a dozen times in all. Perhaps six afternoons in Pilgrim’s studio, with the warmth of the gas fire and the musty shawls to wrap themselves in. There had been sufficient time for Grace to learn to enjoy what they did, even to feel eager for it, and more than enough for the damage to be done. She had never talked to Jeannie about ‘fixing herself up’, whatever that was supposed to mean, and Pilgrim had never mentioned it again.

Clio licked her dry lips, and asked the question. ‘Who is it? Grace, whose baby?’ She heard the hostility in her own voice, and felt Julius’s eyes flick towards her.

‘Pilgrim’s, of course.’ Grace hardly turned her head. She was as white as paper now, even her lips were colourless. The pearls looked dirty yellow against her neck. She said to Jake, ‘I thought you might know somebody who could help me. A doctor. If not a proper doctor, then whoever it is who does these things.’ She spoke as if they were discussing some unpleasant but necessary domestic chore.

Jake’s horrified reaction showed clearly in his face. ‘I don’t know anyone who would contemplate performing an abortion, if you mean a medically acceptable operation. And I have seen women die after going to back-street abortionists. I have
seen
them, Grace.’ He was still kneeling in front of her, holding her hands, almost as white in the face as she was herself. ‘You can’t butcher yourself.’

Grace was stonily calm. She had already done her thinking. ‘I was afraid you would say that,’ she said. She disengaged her hands from Jake’s, spread out her ringless fingers and stared at them. ‘It seems that there is no alternative but to get married as quickly as possible.’

Clio stumbled to her feet, almost knocking over her chair.

‘To
Pilgrim
?’

She knew that there was as much envy as disbelief in her voice. The idea of marriage seemed so safe and simple. If she were married to Pilgrim, Clio thought, and a mother, her life would be settled. There would be no more uncertainty, and no need to answer questions for herself about what to do with her time, and what goals to aim for. She would know what to believe in, because it would be her husband and his work and their children.

Grace was laughing. It was an uncomfortable, jagged laugh that was full of bitterness. ‘Not to Pilgrim. I wouldn’t marry him, any more than he would marry me. No, I shall marry Anthony Brock. Our baby will be born a little early, but it will turn out to be as good a little Brock as anyone could wish for.’

Julius moved then, stiffly, as if his limbs hurt him, across the room to where Grace sat. He crouched down beside his brother but he was oblivious of Jake, and of Clio too. There might have been no one else in the house but Grace and himself.

‘I love you,’ he whispered to her. ‘I’ll marry you. Marry me, not Anthony Brock.’

With burning face and eyes, Clio watched her brothers as they knelt at Grace’s feet. A tidal wave of anger and bitterness was sweeping through her.

All the time Pilgrim had been lecturing her on Cubism and Christopher Wren and Samuel Palmer, all the time she had been meekly listening to him, he had been making love to Grace. While she had been childishly dreaming, Grace had taken the real thing for herself, just as she had always done, all through their childhood and growing up. While she had been standing to one side waiting for life to begin, Grace had helped herself to it. Clio thought savagely that now, not even to be pregnant with Pilgrim’s baby would be a punishment for Grace.

She would simply marry Anthony, wry and ironic Anthony whom Clio had come to look upon as her friend, taking him as she had always taken everything else. She would be the focus of attention, with her wedding and her baby, and Anthony would love her, and she would never have to suffer for any of the damage she caused.

And here were Jake and Julius, like the rival suitors in some stupid Victorian tableau, kneeling at her feet. Even after her confession they were still ready to support and comfort her. Julius had told her that he loved her and would marry her. And still, Grace was ready to turn on loyal Anthony and use him to father another man’s child, to enter into a lifelong lie and expect Clio herself and her brothers to keep her secret for her …

Clio could taste her own sour jealousy in her mouth. She felt how it pinched her lips, and dug premature lines in her cheeks. A childish refrain like one of Alice’s hammered in her head.
It isn’t fair. Grace, it isn’t fair, I hate you for it
…

Grace had Pilgrim, and Anthony, and Jake and Julius. Clio felt that she was left with nobody. Grace had even taken Peter Dennis, although Clio knew in her heart that he had loved her, not Grace.

The taste in her mouth was so strong that she wondered if it would make her sick. She forced herself to take deep breaths of air into her churning stomach.

Grace put out her hand and stroked Julius’s hair. She said very quietly, ‘Thank you. I’ll remember that you offered that, Julius. I wish I could marry you, but I can’t. It would be like marrying Clio.’

Julius’s head was bent under her hand, and she couldn’t see his face.

‘You could do much worse than marry Anthony Brock,’ Jake said. He felt that it was his role to be practical. He was thinking that Anthony would make an excellent husband for Grace, and a devoted father when the time came. Grace would be lucky to have him, and in the end she would probably come to love him exactly as her mother had learnt to love John Leominster. A well-disguised accident of paternity would soon be forgotten.

Grace nodded wearily. ‘I’m sure you are right,’ she said.

She had been clinging to the hope that somehow, against all rational principles, to lay her problem in front of the magic circle would be to find a solution. But there was no solution, of course. There was no such thing as magic, and the circle was broken open. She had snapped the link between Clio and herself. She could see it in her cousin’s face; she had made an enemy of Clio now.

The knowledge made Grace long for her support and friendship. She knew that she had brought herself to the edge of disaster and humiliation, and her only resort was to trap herself in a marriage with a man she didn’t love. All the bright future was extinguished, and in her loss she was crying out for Clio’s love and sympathy.

She looked over Julius’s head to where Clio leant in her dark blue velvet against the scarred old table.

‘Help me,’ she begged.

Clio had been utterly silent, but now a convulsion jarred her. In a single movement she flung herself across to the fender and leapt at Grace with her fingers hooked like claws, ready to tear her face.

‘Clio, Clio …’ Jake and Julius caught her and pinned her arms, dragging her away from Grace who never stirred from her perch on the fender.

Clio found that she was gasping for breath, and she wrenched incoherent words out between her sobs. ‘Help you? I hate you. I despise you, do you hear me?’

Grace’s expression was stiff and controlled. ‘Yes, I can hear you.’

As he looked from one to the other, Julius was horrified to see the wild eyes and wrenching strain of the Janus portrait.

Then Grace stood up, smoothing the pleated front of her lace dress. In her ordinary conversational voice she said, ‘Anthony is coming to spend Christmas at Stretton, you know. I think in a day or so it will be in order for you to congratulate us on our engagement.’ As she walked to the door she was thinking that if it was all a mistake, if there was no baby, she could break off the engagement and all would be well again. But with dull certainty she knew that there was no mistake. It would be better for the baby to be born a Brock than a bastard. It would be better for her to be Mrs Anthony Brock than nobody at all.

‘Goodnight,’ Grace said quietly. ‘Thank you, Jake. Thank you, Julius.’

Eight

Clio unwrapped a pottery plate and smiled at the sight of its decorations of flowers and fruit. She had bought it and its fellows from Omega Workshops, some time after her acquisition of the Gilman painting. The plates and the picture were her first extravagances, the first expressions of her own taste rather than her parents’, and she was very fond of them. They were still almost her only personal possessions apart from books and clothes.

She held the plate up for Jake to see. ‘Where shall we put this?’

Jake was unpacking medical textbooks and stacking them on shelves. He glanced perfunctorily at Clio.

‘It’s a plate, isn’t it? Put it in the kitchen.’

She smiled. Jake was uninterested in aesthetics. Still holding the plate she picked her way through the heaps of their separate belongings to the kitchen at the back of the house.

There was one tall window here, looking out over the chimneys and rooflines of Bloomsbury. Clio saw the roosting places of pigeons amongst iron gutters and soot-stained windowsills, and the dusty windows of the mews opposite, and by craning her neck to the left she could see the tops of the plane trees in Bedford Square. It seemed to her the most satisfactory vista she could possibly imagine. It had taken months of argument and persuasion to achieve it.

In front of the window was a stone sink and a wooden drainer with a zinc dish containing a sliver of soap. Clio turned on the tap and rinsed off the smears left by newspaper wrapping on the Omega plate. She dried it carefully, admiring the colours under the glaze, and put it on the bare pine table at the other side of the kitchen. When she ran her hand over the table top she found a film of dust and ancient crumbs, and even that made her happy because she knew that she would wash it down and it would be part of making a home for herself and Jake, here in four partly furnished rooms overlooking Gower Street.

‘Home,’ she said, trying the word for effect. She pulled out one of the ladder-back chairs from the table and sat down, swinging her feet up on to the seat of another. She could hear Jake in the next room, still arranging his books on the shelves. Jake was about to begin his clinical practice, the last stage on his way to becoming a doctor, at University College Hospital. The hospital was only a few yards further up Gower Street. It was Jake who had found this flat and who had made her see that, by putting together the small amount of Holborough money they had both inherited, they could afford to buy the lease.

But, Clio thought proudly, she had done the rest, the infinitely more difficult part, entirely by herself. She had secured herself a job. She was to start work on Monday morning at nine o’clock.

The thought of it was immediately exciting. She stood up and walked the nine paces from one end of the kitchen to the other, wrapping her arms around herself in pleasure. She was a professional woman, responsible for herself and answerable to nobody. The realization seemed both momentous and deeply romantic.

Two months ago, just after Jake had first mentioned the possibility of her sharing his Gower Street purchase, in the middle of confusion and indecision about her future and without giving herself time to think twice, she had taken the train from Oxford to London to see Max Erdmann in the
Fathom
offices in Doughty Street. She had found Max unusually sober, busy, and without any idea who she was. He had no recollection at all of having offered her a job months before, and his only aim had been to get her out of his chaotic office as quickly as possible in order to get on with compiling his overdue September issue.

To her surprise, Clio found herself standing her ground. ‘I need a job, Mr Erdmann. I can make myself useful.’

Max had barely lifted his head from a sheaf of galley proofs. ‘How do you know that? Can you type, for instance?’

Clio looked round at the drifts of paper, the overflowing wastebins and dusty boxes of
Fathom
back issues and subscription forms.

‘I’m very neat, very methodical. I can keep records and do filing and correct proofs.’