All My Sins Remembered (34 page)

Elizabeth had gone back to that picture again and again. All her prospecting through Grace’s albums of the Twenties brought her back to the same place. Cressida had adored Anthony. And Grace had never been a mother. She had been many things, the biographer’s dream and challenge, but not a mother to her only child.

Clio stopped talking, perhaps out of weariness, more probably because she had seen that Elizabeth was not listening. The two women sat facing each other, across the paraphernalia of Elizabeth’s notes and tape recorder.

‘Have you had enough for today?’ Elizabeth asked, as gently as she could.

She was always relieved when their interviews came to an end, but the relief was tinged with disappointment. She came away with the feeling that Clio could tell more, if she wanted to. Perhaps there was one story or one small detail that would illuminate Grace for her, but the old woman wouldn’t part with it. There was the barrier of dislike between them. Elizabeth knew that it was her own failure that she had been unable to make Clio like her, or trust her.

‘Have
you
?’ Clio snapped back.

‘No. If I’m not tiring you.’

Elizabeth gazed around the room, looking for something neutral to remark on, to set their talk going again.

There were no photographs here. None of her husband, or child, as if Clio’s happiness in the long years of her marriage was a matter to be kept private from visitors. There was only the portrait,
The Janus Face
, behind Clio’s chair. Elizabeth wondered yet again why she kept it there. Pilgrim’s reputation had risen and fallen, and then fallen further still. But he was still representative of the avant-garde of his period. There were three or four of his pictures in the Tate collection, although not currently on display. A major portrait of his was worth money, and Clio was not a rich woman. Elizabeth examined the streaming hair and the Amazonian shoulders, and the staring, straining faces.

‘You don’t like it, do you?’ Clio remarked. ‘You sit there, frowning at it.’

‘Does it matter whether I like it or not? I find it oppressive. The size of it, the weight, in a room this size …’

Surprisingly, Clio laughed. It was a thin, high sound, like the winding down of a mechanical toy. ‘It was once considered rather fine. I stopped asking myself long ago whether I really liked it or not. Here it is, and here it stays. Pilgrim gave it to me, you know, after my father died in 1942. For all those years it hung in the Woodstock Road. In the same place, facing the garden. Pilgrim only took it back once. For his big retrospective.’ When her memories took hold of her Clio’s voice grew stronger, and the swooping accent of the Twenties débutante more noticeable. The laugh came again, louder, a clockwork rattle.

‘Retrospective, dear, if you please. That was very Pilgrim. When was it, now? Nineteen twenty-six. Or 1927, perhaps. He must have been somewhere in his late thirties, no older than that. At the very peak of his popularity. There was a big party, a private view, in the gallery in Albemarle Street. I remember it so clearly. Everyone was there. Everyone.’

Elizabeth leant forward, looking at the revolving spools in her Japanese tape-recorder.

Clio grinned, it could only be described as a grin, showing the pink superstructure of her upper false teeth.

‘Grace and Anthony were there.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Elizabeth said.

‘I nearly didn’t go. I was working at the Mothers’ Clinic.’ She broke off and glared at Elizabeth. ‘Do you know about that? Do you know who Dr Stopes is?’

Elizabeth did know, from the papers Jake’s son had reluctantly allowed her to examine. She tried not to sigh. With the self-absorption of the very old, Clio was only interested in the narrow ribbon of her own history.

‘Yes, of course. The birth-control pioneer.’

‘I worked there with Jake, and Ruth. Ruth wouldn’t go on to the party, she didn’t care for that sort of thing. She went home to Lucas and the baby, and Jake and I drove to the gallery in my car. I had one of those little Austins, do you know about them?’

‘From
Punch
cartoons,’ Elizabeth said.

It was the beginning of 1927.

Clio had been working as an afternoon and evening volunteer at Dr Stopes’ clinic for almost two years. Ruth had taken her there the first time, as a visitor, when Ruth herself had just started work as a part-time nurse.

The Mothers’ Clinic occupied a small house in Marlborough Road, Holloway, two miles away from the almost identical terraced house that Jake had bought for Ruth and their two children in Islington.

Jake was a general practitioner, and his patients were drawn from the working-class population of the area. When Ruth was at home with Lucas, the first baby, and then Rachel, Jake would come in at night to find her with Lucas on her lap and the rosy-faced baby asleep in the bassinet beside them. He would sit down, unlacing his shoes, sometimes too tired and dispirited even to speak. More often than not he would be called out again, urgently summoned by some dirty barefoot urchin thumping on their front door.

Ruth knew what they always said, even though Jake was at the door before her.

‘It’s me mam, sir. She’s bin took bad. Me dad says can yer come?’

Or it was Grandad, or the babby. Or it was our Ruby, who had been up a back street or had resorted to one of her own knitting needles, and was lying bleeding on wadded newspapers with a towel between her teeth to stop her screaming.

‘If there weren’t so many of them,’ Jake would say when he came back. Ruth would watch him, washing his hands at the stone sink in the pantry and rinsing the soap out of the thick, dark hairs on his forearms. ‘If there weren’t too many children and too little money and food and affection to go round.’

Jake sometimes tried to remember exactly how it was that he had felt at the beginning, when he had decided to become a doctor. There had been a fiery idealism, he could recall that much, but the exact way that he had been driven on in his wish to help others now entirely escaped him. He supposed he must have believed he could improve the world for other people, his needy patients, through his own skill and dedication. The thought of the priggish boy, long vanished, made him turn down the corners of his mouth where there were lines deepening behind his thick beard.

It seemed now that the neediness far exceeded his small abilities, to the point where the vast sea of sickness and decay threatened to drown him. He longed to remember how it had been to feel confident of his own value. That would have been a comfort, as he had once found a comfort in clinging to pacifist beliefs in the midst of carnage. But the confidence had faded as he grew older, together with his pacifism. It no longer seemed to matter particularly how hard he worked, or how skilfully, since there was much more suffering in his practice alone than he could ever hope to put right. There seemed no particular reason to push himself any harder, because it would not achieve any significant result, any more than his most fervent denial of violence had saved the life of one single infantryman.

Jake wondered if this was how it was to be a grown man. There was a fading of intensity, that was all it was. Even the war and its aftermath receded, so there was a compensation for this dulling of his senses. He still dreamed of the field hospital, in vivid and nauseating detail, but his fury at the waste had all but gone.

He didn’t even tell Ruth when he had a dream now, although when they were first together she had held him and murmured to him until the sweating and shivering had stopped.

When he was tired and depressed, as he often was these days, Ruth would put her arms around his waist and rest her cheek against his shoulder. Ruth was still optimistic. She would say something to try to rally him, something like, ‘There’s the Clinic. It’s a beginning.’

The first birth-control clinic in London, the first in the entire Empire as Dr Stopes enthusiastically proclaimed, had opened in 1921. Jake worked there for two sessions a week, giving his services for nothing. Every married woman who made her way to it was carefully examined, in comfort and privacy, and then instructed by doctors and nurses how to use the method of birth control that suited her best. All the advice was given free, only the supplies had to be paid for.

The women crowded in. Most of them already had more children than they knew how to look after, and many of them were poor enough to have had to save for their fares across London.

Jake and Ruth were friends and admirers of Marie Stopes. They kept her notorious books
Married Love
and
Wise Parenthood
on their shelves, and talked openly about their theories and advice. They practised as they preached. After Rachel’s birth Ruth had attended the clinic as a patient, and had been fitted with a domed rubber cap. The Hirshes did not intend to increase the size of their family.

As soon as her children were old enough to be left with a local woman for a few hours a day, Ruth joined the Clinic’s nursing staff.

‘I’m trained, I can’t waste that,’ she explained to Clio. ‘And the work is as important as anything I could do. One of the ways that women can take control of their own lives is by limiting the number of children they have to bear. If they are not worn down by constant pregnancies or disabled by abortions, they will have energy to spare for themselves.’

Ruth herself had plenty of energy. She ran her small household and looked after her children and her husband with capable ease, and then she rode off on her bicycle to the Mothers’ Clinic and dispensed the same friendly common sense there as well. Marriage and motherhood had not changed her very much. She was still the same mixture of feminism, strong opinions, and suspicion of anything that was outside her own knowledge or experience. Clio regarded her sister-in-law with affection and admiration. She also knew that Jake loved his wife and was proud of her. But sometimes, just occasionally, she caught him looking at her with an expression that she could only describe as cold, and judgemental.

Ruth took Clio to the Clinic because Clio asked to see it.

Clio sat in the waiting room with all the other women, watching and listening. The women lined up on hard benches, shoulder to shoulder, patiently waiting. Some of them had brought babies or small children who cried and wriggled on their laps, or stared at each other with round eyes in small faces. There was a sour smell of dirt and poverty, and – more disturbing, Clio found, because she had never encountered it before – an atmosphere of absolute resignation, as if disappointment and the absence of hope were inevitable. She felt aware of her own neat clothes and clean hair and skin. But no one looked at her with any curiosity.

Most of the women sat in silence, only whispering commands to their children. There was just one who talked. She was enormously fat, shrouded rather than dressed in a shapeless garment of unsuitable polka dots. She talked to the room in general in a wheezy Cockney monologue.

‘Eleven kids I’ve ’ad, seven of ’em still living. Been knocked up eighteen times in all –’ there was a burst of rasping laughter ‘– before and after getting the ring on me finger. I’m not ashamed of that. Why should I be? Not much else to do down our way, is there, my duck?’

No one laughed with her, but there was no current of disapproval either. It was simply familiar truth to all of them. Except to me, Clio thought.

The voice went on. ‘I’ve come ’ere, see what they can do. I’ve been bad since I fell with the youngest, and they said to me then there shouldn’t be no more. But I’m married, aren’t I? We’ve all got ’usbands, all of us, else we wouldn’t be ’ere.’

Clio’s ringless hands were folded under her gloves.

‘Mine’s a good man, I wouldn’t complain. Works down the docks in the day, goes on the beer at night, comes ’ome and ’e wants it. Well, that’s a man, innit? Stands to reason.’

There was a gusty sigh. The fat woman spread her hands, purplish slabs, and the white flesh all up her arms quivered.

‘So ’ere we all are,’ she said, as if pronouncing a valediction on each of them, all of the silent women ranged on benches around her.

Ruth came out of one of the consulting rooms, small and straight in her nurse’s white uniform. ‘Mrs Miller?’ she asked, smiling at her. The polka-dot mountain heaved itself up and was shepherded in to see Jake.

Clio watched the women coming out again. They carried brown paper bags containing the contraceptive supplies that the doctors had fitted them with and the nurses had explained how to use. Every time, she noticed, there was a change in the woman’s expression. There was a suggestion of daring, a curious glance to each side, as if from now on there might be time to look at the world. Then came a movement to hold the paper bag closer. Every single woman looked younger, and taller. Clio was moved by the sight of them.

‘There must be something I could do to help,’ she said later to Ruth and Jake, reiterating her old plea.

‘We need a supplies clerk, just for a few hours a week,’ Jake said. ‘You could do that easily enough.’

And so Clio added her voluntary work at the Mothers’ Clinic to her responsibilities at
Fathom
.

She had plenty of time, because
Fathom
did not occupy more than half of her attention. She still read whatever Max asked her to read, and gave him her punctilious views that he had come to trust, and she typed for him and dealt with the subscriptions and the galley proofs and the printers. She also acted as an informal confidante to all the aspiring poets and writers and critics who drifted into her office in search of Max and acclaim in the pages of
Fathom
. She listened to their grievances, made them tea, and consoled or congratulated where it was appropriate.

‘How would I manage without you?’ Max sometimes asked when he was in a better than average humour. Clio knew perfectly well that he would manage by replacing her with another eager, literature-struck, over-impressed late schoolgirl.

It was still Max who chose the contributions, and made up the issues, and decided who was to be included in the magazine’s favoured circle and who was not. Clio had learned quite early on that he did not welcome her separate suggestions, and if she discovered a promising writer of her own and put his work forward to Max it was guaranteed that Max would turn it down, and so the discovery would be lost to one of the other quarterlies. She had her role at
Fathom
, a useful role that was quite clearly defined, and although she enjoyed her work and the people who revolved around it, she knew that she had fallen into a comfortable rut. The Mothers’ Clinic provided her with a new focus, and the sense that she was useful, instead of a fixture.