All My Sins Remembered (37 page)

‘Why?’ she asked.

There was a shrug.

She had confronted him with the unexpected. She was the taker, to suit herself, and that was Pilgrim’s own self-appointed role. His expression reminded her of Lucas, Jake’s little boy. She felt immediately protective, and sorry that she had disconcerted him. She leaned over him and rested her head on his chest. She remembered, ‘No action that a loving and considerate man and wife can perform together is wrong, so long as it is agreeable to both of them.’

She moved her head, so that her hair brushed over his belly, and then took him in her mouth. The soft pouches stirred and stiffened and she had to lift her head so that he did not choke her.

‘You surprising girl,’ he said, with clear satisfaction.

Pilgrim pressed her back into the nest of bedding and spread her legs. He pushed himself into her and she felt a brief shock of pain, only very brief. Then he began to move up and down, slowly, sighing a little.

‘Wait,’ Clio said.

‘The famous sponge?’

She slid away from him and stood up. He lay back, in command again now, lazily grinning. She went behind the screen, the old model’s dressing screen behind which she and Grace had daringly taken off their dance dresses. She remembered just how she had felt, emerging from the shelter of it in her silk chemise to Pilgrim’s scrutiny. Her hand was shaking a little as she spilt the drops of oil on to the sponge and watched it soak in, darkening and softening the pocked surface.

She put one foot up on a three-legged stool and took the sponge in her fingers. She was surprised by the muscularity of her own interior. When she looked down she saw that there was a thin thread of blood on her inner thigh.

Clio emerged from behind the screen again. She walked back to the divan and Pilgrim.

There was not much more, after that. He came greedily back inside her, prodding and bucking. He muttered incoherently into her ear as he reared up and down, and she tried to listen and to find the rhythm that would match his and also, as a kind of afterthought, to discover how to satisfy her own needs. Women did have needs, the reading she had done assured her of that. She had a sense that if there had only been more time, more care, she would have been able to pinpoint her own pleasure. She would have been able to peel back the layers of it and reveal the mysterious bud, whatever it was, at the centre of herself.

Was that what Grace had felt?

As it was, Pilgrim ejaculated with a roar that diminished into a groan.

When it was over he lay on top of her in a heavy heap, his breath fanning the damp skin beneath her jaw. Clio stroked his hair. She found herself smiling over his shoulder into the skin of glass that held back the friendly night. She lay quite still. Dr Stopes had written somewhere that it was physically beneficial for men and women to absorb each other’s secretions.

At last Pilgrim gave a gusty sigh. He sat up, mopping at their thighs with one of his supply of painting rags. Then he settled back, unaffectedly cross-legged, and lit a pungent cigarette.

Clio studied him. With his broad shoulders and white, slabby nakedness and his solemn face wreathed in smoke he looked like one of his own portraits.
Naked Man II
, perhaps, or
Omnium Tristum Est
. The urge to laugh came back to her.

‘Well?’ Pilgrim asked.

‘Quite well, thank you,’ she responded. It was less flippant than it sounded. All was well, or quite well. She did feel exactly as if she had put down some heavy piece of luggage or wriggled out of some old, constricting skin. She had taken a lover, but she was comfortably sure that she would not be left with a painful passion for Pilgrim. She would feel the same about him tomorrow as she had done yesterday. It was about herself that she felt differently. She had her own power, and the ability to control, after all.

She also knew that Pilgrim was eyeing her with a shade of guilt and anxiety. Would she weep or complain or make further demands?

Clio held out her hand, rested it on the inelastic skin of his thigh.

‘May I ask you for something?’

‘Of course,’ he told her, meaning ‘Of course not, if it will cost me anything to give it.’ Clio had observed his malicious teasing over the years, and it pleased her to extract a momentary revenge.

‘For one of your cigarettes?’ she said sweetly. The relief in his face was so clear to see that she was reminded of Lucas again. She did laugh now, out loud. He took a cigarette out and lit it for her, and put it between her lips. Then he reached for their whisky glasses.

‘Here’s to the next time,’ he proposed, glad to see that she was happy.

Clio drank before amending the toast. ‘The future,’ she said, over the rim of her glass that tasted strongly of the polishing rag.

When they had drunk the whisky he made her lie down again, and settled beside her, covering them both up with the paisley shawls. With her face close to his and her wide eyes unblinkingly watching him he felt suddenly tender and grateful. He almost said I love you.

‘My lovely Clio. You are unique.’

‘Of course,’ Clio said, with calm conviction.

‘The party for Pilgrim’s retrospective was early in 1927,’ Elizabeth said, in her knowing way. ‘It must have been, if it was just before the first by-election.’

Clio inclined her head. ‘It must, if you say so.’

Her vagueness was deliberate. Silly things, unimportant things, she sometimes couldn’t recall, but others she had never forgotten. February 17, 1927. The day she had lost – no, not lost but divested herself of – her virginity with Pilgrim, on the musty divan in the Charlotte Street studio. Afterwards he had walked her home through the rain to Gower Street because she had left her car outside the gallery. They had sung to each other, only she couldn’t remember what the songs were.

She was not going to tell this inquisitive girl the significance of the date, of course. It was only a party, one of hundreds.

Grace and Anthony had been there, but they had not stayed for long.

A few weeks later, Anthony had been defeated in the South Wales by-election. He had not been expected to win the seat. He had been put up to contest it in order to show what he could do, and he had done well. He had reduced the Labour majority by several thousands.

In the same year Grace had had a miscarriage, a late one, and had been ill for some months. After Grace lost the baby, Anthony and she had dropped out of their set of bright young people. They seemed to prefer one another’s company to anyone else’s. Clio had hardly seen them.

She had been busy herself.

Pilgrim’s retrospective, she remembered. The portrait, hanging at the end of the gallery. Pride of place, someone had said. Was it Pilgrim?

On that evening, in the crush of the party, she had first met Miles Lennox.

Ten

Shropshire, May 30, 1929

The black car with its curved mudguards like fastidiously raised eyebrows was incongruous at the bottom of the village street. The sleek, shiny length of it crept up the hill a few paces and then stopped. Blue ribbons fluttered from the bright chrome of the door handles, and the bumpers glittered in the May sunshine.

The women hesitated in the shadows of their doorways, and the children stopped playing and stared with their mouths hanging open. Anthony Brock’s driver climbed out and skirted the long bonnet, trying not to wince at the sight of the whitish dust from the unmade road that filmed his polished coachwork.

He opened the passenger door, and Grace stepped out.

She crossed the street at once, gaily heading for the nearest pair of cottages. She held out her hand to the aproned woman hovering on her step and said, ‘It’s Mrs Fletcher, isn’t it?’

The woman was amazed, and delighted, as Grace had intended her to be. But it was not such a great feat of memory. The district electoral roll lay on the warm leather seat in the car. Grace had studied it as they drove from village to village between the high hedges of West Shropshire. During the last few days, canvassing with Anthony, she had visited almost every hamlet in the rural constituency and now, on polling day itself, she felt as if she knew every lane and farm and every cottager and labourer who inhabited them. It was, in any case, almost her home ground. Stretton lay only twenty miles north of this village, within the constituency borders.

The woman shook the offered fingers, nodding vigorously, brushing her wispy hair back from her red face with her unoccupied hand. One knee folded behind the other as if they might collapse together into a curtsey, but reached a compromise in a parlourmaid’s bob.

‘Yes, mum, my lady, that is.’

‘Mrs Fletcher, are you coming out to vote?’

Mrs Fletcher looked embarrassed. She glanced from side to side, hoping to find an answer reflected in the craning faces of her neighbours.

‘I don’t know, mum. I don’t know as my husband …’

Grace said gently, ‘Your vote is your own, you know. Don’t you remember the Franchise Act? We women have won the right to a vote and we owe it to one another to use that right.’

She was smiling and her smile was warm and genuine, even after more than half a day’s constant employment. The words ‘we women’ seemed to hang in the still air.

Mrs Fletcher looked her in the eye now. The gulf between the labourer’s wife in her apron and the candidate’s in her pearls and her navy and white spotted silk seemed to have narrowed a little. On the doorsteps, that was Grace’s talent. It was impossible to forget that she was Lady Grace, daughter of the Lord Lieutenant of the county and the Conservative candidate’s wife, yet at the same time her manner was friendly and direct. The women thought that she was easy to talk to. ‘No airs and graces on her,’ they told one another. The men looked sidelong at her with grudging admiration.

Mrs Fletcher folded her arms. ‘Maybe so,’ she conceded. ‘Maybe so. But if I come out and vote for your husband, what will he do for me and mine? Tell me that, now.’ She looked round triumphantly at her neighbours, surprised and pleased by her own daring. There was a murmur of agreement, although no one else was quite brave enough to echo her words.

Grace turned to face the little crowd that had gathered. There were women and old men and grimy-faced children, all mutely staring at her.

‘You know me, all of you, don’t you? You know my father and my brother, and what this part of England means to us? My husband is a young man, a good man. He is proud to have been selected as your candidate. A vote for him is a vote for peace in the world for your children, for work for your menfolk, but it is also a vote for West Shropshire, for
yourselves
.’

Her voice was ringing. There was a moment’s silence and then, not exactly a cheer, but a ragged chorus of assent. ‘’Er’s right,’ someone said from the back of the group. ‘’Er’s one of our own, like old Wardle.’

Mr Wardle was the previous Conservative member, a local landowner, retiring after a long silent career on the back benches.

‘What’ud we be doing with one of them Liberal lot, or one of MacDonald’s pack of Bolshies?’ Grace’s supporter demanded.

‘Quite right, sir,’ Grace called cheerfully. ‘Now then, who’s coming to the polls with me?’ She tucked a strand of dark hair back under the brim of her navy-blue cloche and bent down to the level of the children. She selected the smallest girl with the least matted hair and an almost clean jersey, and hoisted her up in her arms. ‘You’ll come, won’t you? You’d like a ride in my car, I expect, and you can bring your mother and whoever else would like to come. And those we can’t fit in, we’ll come back for. That’s fair, isn’t it?’

The child nodded, solemn-faced, her eyes on Grace’s lustrous pearls.

The other children swarmed over the car. Anthony’s chauffeur thought longingly of his chamois leather, but Grace only laughed and let them clamber in their boots over the upholstery. The mothers and grandparents followed behind, leaning unaccustomedly back in the plush interior. When the car was packed full Grace waved at those left in the dusty road. ‘We’ll be back for you,’ she called gaily, and the car rolled away.

The polling station was two miles away, in another village, in the school that served all the outlying hamlets. As they drove a boy leant over the back of Grace’s seat and shouted in her ear, ‘Usually us has to walk all this way to school.’

‘Today is special. Election day,’ she said. ‘Today you ride.’

The road was almost a tunnel, winding between green hedges laced with may blossom. Grace knew that in the grass along the high banks there would be the white stars of wild strawberry flowers, and the pale freckle of wood violets. She felt a kind of rooted affection for this home countryside, although in the same instant she could have laughed at her own sentimentality. It would not matter if Anthony were standing for some East End constituency or a Midlands manufacturing town or anywhere else, so long as he won it. But at the same time it gave her satisfaction to think that he was here, on the other side of the county, ferrying the voters back and forth along the familiar lanes, and that Hugo and Thomas were out too, all the big shiny cars festooned with blue ribbons and rosettes, bringing their people in.

Anthony had done well in his unwinnable South Wales by-election. The party had rewarded him with West Shropshire, a safe seat, his own ground at least by marriage. He had worked hard, from the beginning of the campaign, and he deserved to hold the solid majority.

If we don’t, Grace thought, it won’t be for want of trying.

But Mr Baldwin’s re-election battle-cry of ‘Safety First’ had hardly set the electorate on fire. There was a feeling that after five years of Conservative government a change would be welcome. And even in the rural depths of West Shropshire both Liberals and Labour were fielding strong candidates. Nothing would be certain until after the last votes had been counted.

The packed car smelt strongly of bodies and two or three of the children had begun to sing. There was a holiday atmosphere. ‘As good as the Church outing,’ someone was saying. ‘Vicar took us in a charabanc all the way to Shrewsbury.’