All My Sins Remembered (35 page)

Clio took charge of the Clinic stores, and became responsible for monitoring and reordering the stocks of rubber caps and contraceptive pessaries, sponges and sheaths. She also kept the records, filing the case-sheets after the nurses had completed them, and she set up a simple appointments system to help the doctors and reduce the waiting time for the patients. It gave her satisfaction to see the women coming in, and leaving again, looking around them as they went, with their brown paper bags in their arms.

There was a good deal of open talk amongst the staff. It was part of the Clinic’s philosophy, inherited directly from Marie Stopes, that sexual matters could be freely discussed between adults and professionals. Clio read the books and listened to what was said. Along with her growing expertise on methods of contraception she absorbed the theory that sex was natural, and beneficial, and even desirable for healthy adults. She knew, because she had heard the assurance made often enough, that nothing a married couple did together could be regarded as wrong or shameful, provided that it gave pleasure to both of them. She knew about sexual stimuli and erogeneity and the female orgasm.

Sometimes, with a slight sense of shame, she looked speculatively at Jake and Ruth, and found herself envying them.

Clio was fully aware of the irony of her position. She was a sexually knowledgeable virgin. Peter Dennis’s feverish embraces and Pilgrim’s mild philandering seemed a long time in her past, and there had been no one else since then. She began to understand, with dry regret, that Eleanor’s fears for her had been justified. There were few eligible men of her age, and there were very many eager women. Of the writers and artists she met in Soho and Bloomsbury, most were married, or at least attached. Those who were not were drunk, or hopelessly disreputable, or not interested in women. In the last years, dividing her time between Max Erdmann and the Clinic, Clio had almost accepted the external image of herself. She was a spinster of almost twenty-six.

Even the Babies were grown up. Phoebe Stretton was nineteen, a jazz-mad flapper who had adopted the knowing manners of her generation. ‘How’s your sex life, darling?’ she and her friends would greet each other. At seventeen Tabby Hirsh was shy and quiet, but she had cut her hair like Phoebe’s and was going to dances with her cousins. Alice was fifteen. She was not out yet, but she watched everything the others did with greedy curiosity. All the Babies thought that Grace was an old married lady, and that Clio was simply old.

On the evening of the party for Pilgrim’s retrospective, it happened that Jake and Ruth and Clio had all been at the Clinic. Their various shifts did not usually coincide, but tonight Clio met them outside as she locked the front door of the Holloway house.

‘I don’t want to go,’ Ruth was saying briskly. ‘It will be all drink and arty talk, the usual nonsense.’

‘I would like to go. I would welcome a drink, and art and nonsense are welcome diversions these days. Clio, you’re coming to Pilgrim’s party, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I’m coming. I’d like to see Pilgrim, and Max will expect me to be there.’ It would be the same familiar faces and arty talk, just as Ruth predicted, but Clio thought with a touch of weariness that that was not a reason either for going or for staying away. She would go because she had nothing else in particular to do. ‘I’ll drive you,’ she told Jake.

Ruth was already wheeling her bicycle to the kerb. ‘Don’t expect a hot dinner when you get back,’ she called in Jake’s direction, and pedalled away. Jake didn’t watch her departure. He bent himself double and folded his long arms and legs into Clio’s tiny car.

Clio drove for a little distance in silence. Then she asked, ‘Is everything all right?’

Jake had grown fleshier since his marriage. He was clean-shaven lately, but even without the curling black beard his resemblance to Nathaniel was growing stronger and stronger.

He said in a flat voice, ‘Everything? Yes, Clio, thank you. Everything is quite all right.’

The Albemarle Street gallery was already crowded when they reached it. Clio and Jake were carried away from each other at once by the cross-currents of people. Clio saw Pilgrim’s head in the middle of the room and she fought her way across to him, ducking between raised glasses and gesticulating hands and the choppy waters of conversation.

‘A purely materialistic functionalism …’

‘Rapacious bloody agents …’

There were familiar faces everywhere, but the familiarity seemed stale rather than comfortable. Pilgrim put his arm around her and kissed her on the mouth. He was wearing a white silk shirt with a yoke and full sleeves that made him look even more like a prosperous gypsy.

‘Clio, my Clio, here you are. What do you think of the hang?’ He waved over the milling heads in the direction of the gallery walls.

‘I’m sure I would admire it if I could only see it.’

‘Oh, they’ll all bugger off before long. Your picture is over there, at the end. Pride of place. And look who’s standing in front of it.’

She looked, and saw Anthony and Grace. They were turned away from
The Janus Face
and they were talking intently. Even in the crush they gave the impression of being a little apart. Pilgrim winked at Clio.

Clio left him and battled on across the room. She saw Grace and Anthony hardly at all nowadays. The last time had been in Oxford, a few months ago, at Nathaniel’s fifty-fifth birthday party. She knew that Anthony devoted himself to his business and the beginnings of a political career, and that Grace spent her time with a Society set whose doings were regularly written up in the gossip columns. Grace was ‘Party-going Lady Grace’, or ‘Lovely and vivacious wife of that bright young man Anthony Brock’.

Sometimes, very rarely, Clio’s social path intersected hers. They had met at Duff and Lady Diana Cooper’s, who were neighbours of Clio’s in Gower Street, and once at a Twelfth Night party in Gordon Square where Lydia Lopokova had danced for the company. But Clio’s life centred on Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, and she almost never crossed over into Mayfair.

Anthony and Grace greeted her warmly. Anthony looked tired and there were frown marks between his eyebrows, but his gappy smile and humorous manner were unchanged. Grace was unerringly chic in a black satin tunic dress with long ropes of pearls. The cousins kissed each other, and as they separated a flashbulb popped in front of them. The photographer ducked and was reabsorbed by the crowd as rapidly as he had emerged.

Grace shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Too good a chance for him to miss. The picture’ll be in tomorrow’s
Daily Mail
captioned “Kiss and make up for Pilgrim’s Janus” or something equally rubbishy.’

‘“Vivacious Lady Grace’s Janus kiss”, more likely,’ Clio could not help saying. She looked up at the picture. It no longer told the truth, even if it once had done. All the tension trapped in it seemed incongruous now. It had dissipated itself in reality, fading away into indifference. Grace and she were grown up, grown away. It was only a portrait, a self-consciously deliberate flouting of convention that looked less outrageous than it once had done.

‘What are you doing here?’ Clio asked. Grace usually took care to avoid Pilgrim.

‘Anthony wanted to come,’ Grace said, as if that were sufficient explanation. Another flashbulb went off in their faces, leaving a white dazzle burning in their eyes.

Grace put her hand to Clio’s arm. ‘Let’s move away. We’re striking altogether too much of a pose.’

They moved into a corner, hemmed in by two of Pilgrim’s still lifes. Clio took a glass of red wine off a passing tray. It was better than the usual vinegar and she drank it gratefully, then replaced the empty glass with another full one. The three of them exchanged family information, trading assurances that Cressida was well for the latest news from Julius. Julius had taken Jake’s place in Gower Street for a time, then had gone to live in Paris. He was beginning to be in demand on the European concert circuit and found Paris a more congenial base than London.

‘I miss him,’ Grace said.

‘Yes,’ Clio conceded. She drank some more wine. The room was very hot, but the crowd was beginning to thin out. ‘But what about you two?’

Grace looked at Anthony, then put her hand on his arm. Her nails were painted to match her lips. ‘We’ve just come back from Swansea. We’ve heard that Anthony has been adopted as the candidate. You know he was up for selection? Meetings, platforms, speeches. It’s as if he was born for it, Clio. He’s a natural politician.’

There was a resonance in Grace’s voice that Clio had never heard before. She tried to define for herself exactly what it was that was new, and then she realized it was simply that Grace was excited. The possibility of Anthony becoming an MP
excited
her.

It was good news, and Clio’s pleasure in it was unaffected. ‘Anthony, I’m so glad. Congratulations, and congratulations.’

It was a by-election, following the death of the sitting member in a solid Labour constituency. Anthony accepted Clio’s good wishes with characteristic modesty. ‘It’s not an easy one. There’s a majority of fifteen thousand. But I think we can dent it, a significant dent.’ He put his hand over Grace’s covering hers where it rested on his arm.

They talked for a little while longer, and Clio saw how Grace bent her head towards her husband, and how she listened to what he said. The cold pressure of her own loneliness seemed more evident in the overheated room.

Pilgrim passed by them, with Jeannie and two young men. Jeannie had aged noticeably. Her hennaed hair had thinned to reveal patches of scalp and she had teased the remainder into defiant puffs. The skin of her face was invisible under a layer of white powder patched with rouge and her eyes squinted out of a delta of cracks. She was wearing an elaborate brocaded coat with a dirty lace collar. She was also quite drunk.

‘Grace and Anthony, this is a
great
honour,’ Pilgrim called out, swooping back towards them. His little retinue stopped short and regrouped around him. ‘You all know Gloriana, of course?’

The comparison was cruelly accurate, like the best of Pilgrim’s malicious wit. Jeannie looked exactly like the ancient Queen Elizabeth, still imagining herself the majestic beauty.

‘And this is Tony Hardy. And Miles Lennox.’

Clio had met Tony Hardy before. He was a publisher with an interest in experimental fiction. And she had heard of Miles Lennox. He had been medically unfit for combat but he had written some acclaimed war poetry, and a year or so after the end of the war had published a highly praised collection of stories. She had heard someone saying, somewhere, that Miles Lennox would write the great post-war novel. She looked at him with interest and saw a fair-haired man with neat features and clear, light-olive skin. He held out his hand and she shook it.

Conversations began around her. She heard Jeannie making some incoherent overture to Grace, and Anthony complimenting Pilgrim on his work. Tony Hardy said something to her about
Fathom
, and she made a sensible response and then found herself listening to the words as though they issued from someone else’s mouth.

Too much wine, she told herself, and then, with surprising defiance, Why not?

Miles Lennox smiled at her. ‘You’re Clio Hirsh. I’ve heard about you.’

Jake was in the opposite corner of the room. He was talking to silver-haired Isolde, who seemed only to grow taller, and slimmer, and younger-looking as time passed. Isolde had replaced Jeannie as Pilgrim’s official girl, but it was not an exclusive commitment for either of them.

Jake had drunk several glasses of the good wine. He was thinking sentimentally that Isolde was like a silver birch tree. She had tiny breasts, and hips like a boy’s. She stood very close to him, with her wide-apart pale green eyes fixed on his, and uttered a stream of nonsense in a soft, low voice. She was very unlike Ruth. She was the exact opposite of Ruth, Jake thought, because Ruth was small and buxom with a bloom of dark hair on her upper lip. Ruth was brisk, and sturdy, and she never talked nonsense or stared at him with unfocused lust. Even in bed, Ruth was businesslike.

Jake felt exactly as he had done long ago with Grace in the hawthorn corner of the meadow. He wanted to pull this Isolde down into the long grass and cover the sappy length of her with his black bulk.

It seemed to Clio that when she looked around again the room was empty. Grace and Anthony had gone, and Jeannie had been helped away by Tony Hardy and, presumably, Miles Lennox. Jake was nowhere to be seen.

She walked slowly past the pictures, examining each one in turn.

Pilgrim materialized beside her. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think, I think …’ She started to laugh, realizing that she had no idea what she thought. ‘I think you are
magnificent
.’

‘Thank you, dear Clio. I’m glad of that.’ He sighed theatrically. ‘It seems that we are both abandoned.’

Clio squinted. Evidently Isolde had disappeared too. Mustering some dignity she said, ‘
I
haven’t been abandoned. I am just myself.’

Pilgrim put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Yes, you are, aren’t you? Now, I am going to take you out to dinner. Don’t say no, or make some dull objection.’

‘I don’t have any objection. I would like some dinner, thank you.’

Anthony and Grace had gone home to South Audley Street.

There was a cold supper laid out in the dining room, so they took their plates and sat in armchairs beside the fire. Grace kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on a stool.

‘We could have looked in at the Ritz, or the Café de Paris,’ Anthony said, handing her her filled glass.

‘We could have done. And we would have joined some people, and then gone on with them to the Bat or the Slipspin. Then you would have said that you had an early start in the morning and should come home, and I would want to dance some more, so in order not to start a quarrel you would have come home in a taxi and somebody or other would have seen me back here later on. By which time you would be in bed asleep, and when I woke up in the morning you would already have gone out, and so I would not see you until tomorrow night.’