All My Sins Remembered (33 page)

‘Dance with me, Julius, won’t you?’ Gratefully he took her in his arms.

They danced in silence. They were both reminded of the lessons of their childhood, when they had been one of the pairs of children circling under a teacher’s scrutiny in the ballroom of somebody’s London house. Julius had always been the better dancer. He had listened to the music, serious-faced, when Grace wanted to run away and hide behind the chairs. He bent his head close to hers now.

‘Don’t be unhappy,’ he said softly.

Two spots of colour showed beneath Grace’s white face-powder. ‘I’m not in the least unhappy. I’m having the very best time.’

She would have repeated her protestation but her attention was diverted. Jeannie had staggered to her feet and in doing so had caught at a spindly tripod table placed beside the sofa. The table overbalanced and a fluted glass vase smashed on the parquet floor.

‘Steady,’ Anthony said, catching at her elbow.

Jeannie rounded on him. She frowned in the attempt to focus. Then she shook his hand off and tossed her head, almost falling again.

‘Bourgeoisie,’ she yelled at the room. ‘Bloody silver salvers and decanters and napkin rings. How d’ye do and old boy and kiss my backside. Think I’m not good enough, don’t you?’

‘I don’t think anything,’ Anthony murmured.

Jeannie was gathering her strength. She swung her fist and connected with Anthony’s cheekbone. There was a sharp smacking sound. Anthony hardly flinched but he stared at her, his face turning a dull red. Ruth left Jake and went to put her arm around Jeannie’s waist.

‘Stop it,’ she said clearly. ‘Stop it now, there’s a good girl.’

With a sigh, Pilgrim put his glass down. ‘Jeannie. It’s time to go home.’

He could hardly walk straight, but he went to support her other side. They leant on to Ruth like a house of cards about to topple. Jeannie gave a sidelong, cunning smile and then pointed.

‘Julius can take me home. Lives just across the passage. Lovely. Convenient.’

‘We’ll go together, all of us,’ Julius said. He looked around with a touch of desperation. ‘Clio will see you to bed.’

‘Don’t want
Clio
.’

Embarrassment galvanized them all into a rush of activity. Pilgrim and Jeannie were half carried, half hurried down the stairs. Taxis were hailed and Jeannie was levered into one with Clio and Julius. Jake and Ruth took charge of Pilgrim and Max. Once the cabs had turned the corner Grace and Anthony went inside and trailed slowly back up the stairs to the disordered drawing room.

Grace stood with her arms hanging at her side. With the toe of her shoe she poked at the broken glass on the floor. There was a knuckle mark on Anthony’s cheekbone.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said flatly.

He was going to touch her, but she held up her hand, fending him off. Their eyes met in silence. There was the chance to commiserate with each other about their evening and then to laugh about it, but Grace would not take it. She wouldn’t put herself on Anthony’s side against Pilgrim and his friends. They both knew that the refusal was significant.

‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ Anthony said at length. He bent down and began to pick up the tiny fragments of glass.

‘Violet can do that in the morning,’ she told him, but he ignored her. Grace left him and went upstairs to her bedroom.

Clio sat in front of the gas fire in the sitting room at Gower Street. The wine she had drunk had made her feel dazed and thirsty but not at all sleepy. She had made a pot of tea and put on the Chinese silk robe that she had bought in imitation of Grace’s, although she never felt as dashing in it as Grace looked in hers. Now she was trying to read the manuscript of a long story that Max had passed on to her for an opinion. It was about a pig and a monkey, and was probably clever and allegorical, but the significance of it evaded her tonight.

She shuffled the typed pages together and let them lie in her lap. Max would want her comments, but she knew from experience that he wouldn’t be looking for them tomorrow morning. Max wouldn’t appear in the Doughty Street office until after lunch, and then he would spend most of the afternoon groaning and resting his head in his hands. In peaceful solitude she would open and arrange the post, answer the telephone and chat to anyone who called in person. She liked being on her own at
Fathom
, and the illusion of being in charge.

It was only an illusion, of course. Max was far too careful of his paper baby to give her any real, threatening responsibility.

Clio stared at the opening paragraph again. She was beginning to form the heretical opinion that Max’s latest enthusiasm was for several thousand words of pretentious nonsense. She twitched the end of the plait that hung over her shoulder and laid it over her top lip, moustache-fashion, as she had done as a schoolgirl concentrating over an essay.

She heard the front door open and close downstairs. Jake was passing the solicitors’ offices that occupied the ground floor. He had been to take Ruth back to the nurses’ hostel.

They had deposited Pilgrim and Max on the corner of Charlotte Street and gone on to Julius’s digs. Between them Clio and Ruth had put Jeannie to bed, not very gently.

‘How can anyone live like this?’ Ruth had wondered, wrinkling her nose as she looked at the mess in the room. Clio had only laughed. They left Jeannie lying on her side – ‘In case she vomits in her sleep,’ Ruth explained – and snoring loudly. Julius was clearly relieved.

Jake came in and stood in front of Clio, his back to the fire. When she saw his face she put the manuscript aside.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked. His expression reminded her of the way he had looked when he was given a bicycle for his fourteenth birthday. He was dazzled, and at the same time afraid that the prize might be snatched away again.

‘I asked Ruth to marry me. She said yes.’

Clio leapt up and wrapped her arms around his neck. ‘I’m so pleased. I’m so happy for you both. Oh, Jake, I truly am pleased.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘When? When will it be?’

‘Next year, after I qualify.’

Evidence of Ruth’s prudent common sense in that. Nothing hurried, nothing impulsive. Clio held both Jake’s hands, looking into his face. His happiness was plain to see.

‘Grace, and now you. Only me and Julius left.’

‘Your turn will come,’ Jake told her. ‘You’ll see. If that’s what you want.’

‘I don’t think I know what I want,’ Clio said, almost to herself. She felt that the words struck an inappropriate, melancholy note. In a different voice she said, ‘There’s some tea, is that celebratory enough? There isn’t anything to drink.’

‘I never want to see another drink. This evening was so awful.’ They laughed at the recollection of it.

Grace’s engagement diary was lying on the table beside her bed, and she looked at it before she turned off the light.

Tomorrow she would have lunch with another friend, a young married woman like herself. They would eat very little and smoke at the table, in defiance of custom. They would gossip desultorily about the people they knew in common. In the evening Grace had accepted an invitation for Anthony and herself to dine with one of the couples in their set. There would be cocktails, more gossip, and perhaps a sortie to a nightclub. She would dance with the husbands of the other women, and flirt with them if she could summon the energy.

She hadn’t bothered to look at the arrangements for the day after that. She closed the little book and reached up for the light switch.

Grace lay and looked up into the darkness. She had locked the door that led into Anthony’s dressing room and bedroom. She waited to hear him turn the handle, wanting to know that he had tried to come in to her. She listened hard, straining into the silence with such intensity that she felt the pain in her temples. After all the drinking she had done she felt that the bones of her skull might collapse into the deeper darkness within her head. She didn’t hear anything.

Nine

Elizabeth’s visits to the house in Little Venice were sometimes fruitless. On the bad days Clio sat in her chair, outwardly the same small, upright figure, but her memory had slipped out of focus and she asked her visitor querulously why her tea was late, and where her usual nurse had gone. And then on other days her mind was clearer, and she seemed to welcome the opportunity to relive her memories.

On these days Elizabeth let her talk, interested in the links and connections of reminiscence although the threads were often buried too deeply for her to follow. She had a sense of the older woman’s recollections forming a fragile web, and her mind travelling out and along the filaments like the spider darting from its still place at the centre.

‘What was she like, when she was a little girl?’ Elizabeth asked once.

Clio had been rambling. One minute she was recalling the scent of the roses that Eleanor had grown in the Oxford garden, and in the next she was disparaging the upbringing of modern children.

‘We were taught to hold up our heads, speak when spoken to. We did the same for our own children. Cressida, Romy …’

Clio did not like to be interrupted in the unravelling of her memories. Her confusion was probably feigned, but her tetchiness was real enough. She waved her knotted hand impatiently. ‘Who? What was
who
like?’

‘Cressida. My mother. When she was small.’

There were photographs, of course. It had been one of Grace’s patient occupations to mount them in albums, each snapshot cornered with triangular hinges and captioned with names and dates. Elizabeth had been through all the big, heavy volumes, pursuing and reidentifying the faces that smiled out of groups on lawns, on beaches, or around tables. The thick, dark grey pages were brittle but well preserved, and still interleaved with whitish tissue that covered the hundreds of captured smiles like so many shrouds.

Amongst them there were pictures of Cressida in the elaborate baby clothes of the time, propped up against cushions or held by a uniformed nurse. There were more informal snapshots of her toddling in the sunshine with her hand in Anthony’s, or at Stretton perched on a tiny pony, or dressed up as Little Miss Muffet for some village fête with a mob cap on her head and a huge spider made from pipe cleaners crouching on her shoulder.

There were almost none of her alone with Grace. Elizabeth could only recall one. There was no caption beneath it, unusually, not even a date, but it was clearly Cressida’s christening. The baby was dressed in the Leominster christening robe, a waterfall of antique lace. Her mother seemed to hold her inexpertly, in a bundle, instead of showing her off. Only her round head and one small fist were visible. Grace was wearing a black and white organdie dress, trimmed with inset bands of ribbon. She gazed into the eye of the camera from beneath the brim of a black ciré hat decorated with osprey feathers. Her face was expressionless.

‘She was well behaved. A good, quiet little girl.’

Elizabeth nodded. Clio’s thoughts were still running on the social deficiencies of modern children. There was nothing there, and no point in pursuing the subject. She let her own mind wander.

Grace’s photograph albums were revealing, but only to a superficial level. It was most noticeable that for the years following the Brocks’ marriage until some time in 1927, almost all the photographs that Grace had chosen were of parties. There were the startled eyes and half-turned heads of flashbulb pictures snatched through a veil of cigarette smoke in nightclubs and restaurants, where the men had white ties and brilliantined hair and the women held glasses to lips painted a plum-red that looked black in the flash. Everyone seemed always to be laughing, or drinking, or tilting languidly back in a chair to squint through the smoke.

Other pictures were taken on country-house lawns, where terraces or open French doors provided the backdrop for informal groups in deckchairs or crowded hilariously on to sunbeds. The men wore flannels and the women sundresses, and they cuddled together on the beds and on the rugs spread out on the grass, husbands with other men’s wives, and the wives with anyone but their own husbands. Their mouths were often open because they were calling out to the photographer, and there were waving arms and bare feet and open-necked shirts. There was usually a portable gramophone, tucked beside one of the deckchairs, and a tray of glasses, and someone at the front striking a theatrical pose.

There were more pictures of parties on beaches in the South of France, and some of the Venice Lido, with men and women in almost identical bathing suits that covered their shoulders and thighs. In these photographs there was more horseplay, with the women riding on the men’s shoulders and the men wrestling in the sand, and tanned arms draped over shoulders as they crowded together into the frame, all of them laughing in the sun.

There were photographs of two or three couples squeezed into big shiny cars, waving; of barely recognizable faces at fancy-dress parties; frowning through boot-blacking or beneath turbans; of tennis parties and race-meetings and Christmases.

Elizabeth noted that all these gatherings seemed to leave little room for the family. There were no pictures of Grace and Anthony alone together. When they did appear in the same photograph it was at opposite ends of some group, over a caption in Grace’s erratic handwriting that would read, ‘Reggie, Ivor, Viola, Katharine, self, Diana, St John, Duff, Anthony. Deauville, 1926.’

After the baby pictures Cressida hardly appeared at all. Sometimes she was there to one side, almost like a shadow, her pale face half turned from the camera or hidden by a hank of dark hair. She was in the very few family groups that Grace had recorded. There was one at Stretton, where she was a five-year-old standing solemnly in front of her uncle Thomas, and another at Oxford, taken a year or so later at a birthday party for Nathaniel. She was holding Tabby’s hand and looking over her shoulder, as if searching for Anthony in the row of men at the back. Grace was near the centre, giving the camera her expressionless stare.

Cressida was smiling in only two of her photographs, and in both of them she was alone with Anthony. In one of them he was swinging her in the air, and in the other he was on horseback. Cressida was perched in front of him, holding tightly to the pommel of the saddle, and her face was suffused with happiness.