All My Sins Remembered (38 page)

At the polling station the car disgorged Grace’s cargo of voters. They filed into the Victorian schoolhouse and the children hung around in the yard, peering at the officials and the placards tied with string to the iron railings. The familiar building was different for a day.

The women and old people came out again, looking solemn and important. Grace shepherded them back into the car. ‘Home we go. Thank you for coming, thank you for your support.’

As they motored back through the lanes she was wondering, How many more villages did they have time for, how many more of their people could she bring out to vote for Anthony? She was tired now, and thirsty, and her face felt stiff with smiling.

Anthony Brock, MP. Grace was superstitious. Even now, she quenched the flicker of pleasure the thought gave her. Last night at Stretton Anthony had said, ‘I think we have done all we can,’ and she had corrected him fiercely, ‘Not until the polls close tomorrow night.’

Alice sat on the window seat in her bedroom at Stretton, looking down the curve of the carriage drive between the great trees. She was waiting for the cars to come back. She had decided that as soon as she saw Grace and Anthony arrive she would run downstairs to meet them. She would be first to hear the news, whatever stupid Cressida chose to do.

There was a book on her lap, but she hadn’t opened it. Her legs were stiff with sitting and the wall felt cold against her back. If her cousins’ old nanny came in she would fuss and scold her about getting chilled and probably hustle her into an armchair with a hot-water bottle. But Alice would not change her position. She stayed huddled in the narrow window slot, her back numb and her eyes smarting with the effort of keeping watch.

Alice had had a bad bout of measles. The illness had affected her eyes and she had spent a long time lying in her darkened bedroom in the Woodstock Road, with the boundaries between sleep and waking blurred by fever. She had dreamed of prisons and confinement, and when she woke up the old room had seemed like a cell. By the time the fever receded and reality had become a matter of certainty again, she was thin and weak, but filled with the need to escape from the room, and from the house that enclosed it.

Blanche had kindly invited her to Stretton to convalesce.

‘Cressida will be here,’ she had told Eleanor on the telephone. ‘They can be company for each other while Grace and Anthony are out electioneering. Although I can’t think why Anthony wants to involve himself in politics at all. Every politician I have ever met talks nothing but inflated nonsense. But John says that Anthony may be some use, and Grace is as keen as mustard on the idea. That’s a blessing, of course, anything that occupies her attention. There won’t be another b-a-b-y until she’s forgotten the last time, I’m sure of that.’

‘Grace is still only a young woman,’ Eleanor had said firmly, only too well aware that Clio was not even married yet. ‘There’s plenty of time for a dozen more babies.’

So Alice had been transported to Stretton wrapped in travelling rugs, and ensconced in a bedroom on the second floor under the care of Nanny Brodribb. It was a few days before the Brocks arrived. She spent the time that Nanny allowed her out of bed wandering through the vast house, listening to its private language of creaks and sighs. It was interesting to have so much space after the confinement of illness, and she found that there was a melancholy satisfaction in solitude after the hubbub of her parent’s ever-open household. She avoided her uncle John Leominster and cousin Hugo, but found it restful to sit in the saloon with her aunt for an hour at teatime.

While Blanche sewed or wrote letters, Alice sat dutifully with her own work but rarely looked at it. She had always been strong and now she felt unmade by sickness, as if there was a new shape to her within the old one, not yet dry or set, waiting for experience to cut its marks into it. She let her thoughts wander, without direction.

The sofa she sat on was opposite the Sargent portrait of her mother and aunt. Alice decided that she much preferred this romantic vision of two fresh young girls to the later image that hung in the drawing room at home. In this one she liked to look at the pearly tones of the skin and the warm coils of hair, and the light and shadow in the intricate pleats and folds of the Victorian dresses. The Pilgrim picture was ugly, for all Nathaniel’s admiration of it.

It was interesting that no one had suggested that Phoebe or Tabitha should sit for anyone when they came out. There would be no thought of it when her own turn came next year. Alice shivered at the very idea of having to expose herself to some painter’s scrutiny. She pulled the loose ends of her hair to hide her cheeks and wrapped her thin arms around herself.

‘Are you warm enough, darling?’ Blanche asked.

‘Yes thank you, Aunt Blanche,’ Alice answered.

After a few days the Brocks arrived, Anthony driving Grace and Cressida in the big black car and the chauffeur following on in a smaller saloon. Alice went shyly out with Blanche to meet them. It was a long time since she had seen her older cousin, and when she came laughing and exclaiming into the great hallway, with her high heels tapping a brittle rhythm, she seemed as modern to Alice as the latest dance tune. With her perfectly made-up face and tiny butterfly of a hat she was also as exotic as a hothouse orchid. Alice stared at her in fascinated admiration.

‘
Alice
. Is this really you?’ Grace kissed her on both cheeks and then held her away so that she could examine her. ‘So grown up. And so beautiful and
slim
. Not at all a fat baby any more.’

Alice had always hated being the baby of the Babies. She said sharply, ‘I’m seventeen and two months.’ And then, afraid that she might have offended this vision of elegance with her brusqueness, she added in an awkward mumble, ‘I’m awfully scraggy. But I’ve been ill, I can’t help it. I expect I’ll grow bonny again, like Nanny says.’

Grace laughed. ‘Don’t think of it. Everyone longs to be thin, you know. Ferocious diets, suffering for every single chocolate, all that. You keep your lovely narrow hips and count yourself lucky.’

Alice flushed with pleasure. Compliments on her appearance did not often come her way in the Woodstock Road. Grace was thin, too. The bones of her hips seemed to jut through the silk jersey she wore belted over a pleated skirt. But at the same time, Alice could not help noticing Cressida standing half hidden behind her father. Her eyes were fixed on the floor, as if she were fascinated by the veining in the marble.

Cressida was plump. She seemed to be made of cushions of plumpness riding on big bones. Her tweed coat was tightly belted around her middle, making her torso look like a pair of solid pillows. She was holding on to her father’s hand.

‘I used to be huge,’ Alice offered into the thin air. No one said anything, and she found her voice trailing away. ‘Before I got the measles.’

Grace was already tapping away, peeling off her long gloves and lifting her hat from her short, waved hair. ‘Oh yes, some tea, please. You wouldn’t believe the traffic on the A1. Where can they all be going? In the saloon, Mummy?’

Anthony said to Cressida, ‘You remember Alice, Cressida, don’t you?’

But Cressida wouldn’t look at her.

Alice thought that Anthony Brock was rather nice, too. He had a funny, attractive gap between his front teeth and an expression that seemed to indicate that he always saw the amusing side of what went on around him. Alice admired the way that he opened doors for Grace and settled her in the chair and clicked his gold lighter for her cigarettes, without ever acting like her appendage. He seemed very capable and strong and masculine. He was quite unlike her own brothers, or her mild, shambling, quizzical father. She decided that she would like just such a husband for herself when the time came, although the thought made her blush even in the privacy of her bedroom. Alice was prudish for her age, although she had spent years trying to be as knowing as Tabby and Phoebe.

She hadn’t understood, until the Brocks arrived, just how lonely she had been. Grace’s feminine camaraderie and Anthony’s friendliness were like a warm wind in spring. Alice opened to them like a flower.

It was a sign of Blanche’s optimistic vagueness that she had assumed that Alice and Cressida would be company for one another. Cressida was not quite nine. The girls regarded each other across a divide in years that was widened even further by Cressida’s hostility.

Alice tried to be friendly at first. Her eyes had just been opened to this new, glamorous phenomenon of Grace and Anthony, and she wanted to talk about them. She imagined, wrongly, that Cressida would be willing to share, not exactly secrets, but snippets of gossip that would enable Alice to feel that she was remotely part of their family.

‘I do think your mother is pretty,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe she’s my first cousin. I mean, she’s practically Clio’s
twin
.’

Clio wore serviceable clothes and talked about art and literature and worked in her spare time in one of Jake’s peculiar clinics.

‘Where does she get her hair done like that? Does she go to a smart salon in Mayfair, or does her – um – maid do it or something?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cressida said, staring out of the window.

Alice tried again. ‘Do you think your father will win the seat?’

‘I don’t know.’ But then, with surprising animation, ‘I hope
not
, if it means he’s going to be away and busy all the time.’

Alice was shocked. ‘How can you hope that?’

‘I can hope whatever I like. He’s
my
father.’

‘Yes, but he’d be a fine MP. Don’t you think?’

‘I hate politics,’ Cressida muttered. ‘And I wouldn’t tell you what I think.’ She stood up, still not looking at Alice, and walked away. Her wool plaid dress was tight on her and decorated with a dainty white piqué collar and cuffs edged with lace, as if Grace bought clothes for a child who in her mind’s eye was small and slender.

At last, Alice saw the two cars coming up the driveway. She threw her book aside and ran.

Grace and Anthony came in together, laughing. There were several men with them wearing dark clothes and big blue rosettes, and there was Hugo leaning on his stick. Alice was so anxious for news of the polling that she slipped through the cheery group and went straight to Grace.

‘What happened? Will we win?’

The men in the dark suits all looked at her. Hugo made an irritable movement as if to brush her aside but Grace swung round, her smile like a beacon.

‘Oh darling, what a day. All the gaffers and grannies and the women and children. In and out of the cars, up hill and down dale, out you come and vote for us, vote for Anthony Brock. It was such fun, you would have
adored
it.’ Grace waved her gloves in the air, like a flag.

I would have done, Alice thought. She could smell and almost taste Grace’s exhilaration, and the glittering force of it drew her like a magnet. The cars, and the men, and stuffy Hugo and even the gaffers and grannies and constituency politics were bathed in the Brocks’ glamour. She ached to be part of it all. The blue rosettes were like the membership insignia of some grand order. The order was to do with old England and country tradition and the proper way of doing things, but it was also spiced with pearls and perfume and wafted in fast cars.

‘Grace was marvellous,’ Anthony said kindly to Alice. ‘She got all the people out, charmed them to the polling stations and back again. If we win, it will be more thanks to her than to me.’

Grace put her arm through his and kissed him on the cheek. ‘No, it won’t. It will be because they want you.’

A jovial man rubbed his hands. ‘The signs are good, either way. No counting any chickens yet, mind you.’

Hugo said impatiently, ‘Gentlemen, come through and have a drink. We have all earned one.’

‘I wouldn’t say no to a whisky and soda,’ said another red-faced man who held a round bowler hat by the brim.

‘Where’s Cress?’ Anthony asked.

‘Upstairs, I think,’ Alice said. She knew that he was going to ask her to fetch her down, but Grace put her hand on his arm.

‘Have a drink first,’ she murmured.

The group moved off, with Grace at its heart, towards the small drawing room. Alice watched them, wistfully. Grace looked back over her shoulder, and winked at her. Alice would have died for her.

Cressida was stupid. Why wasn’t she here, why hadn’t she come down to see her marvellous parents?

‘She’s sweet, Alice, isn’t she?’ Grace was saying to Hugo as they went through. ‘She reminds me so much of Clio at that age, and me too, I suppose. So eager, and hungry for something to happen, any old thing.’

The polls were closed. There was a large party for dinner at Stretton that evening. The agent was there and his wife, and some of the other party officials, and the local Tory grandees with their wives in old-fashioned jewels and stiff gowns with capes and tiers that released the smell of mothballs. Hugo and Thomas, bachelor sons, were gallant to the ladies and the candidate moved smoothly amongst their menfolk, thanking them for their hard work and a good, clean, well-fought campaign. Blanche wore her emeralds with blue velvet and tried to interest herself in the conversations about Mr Baldwin and the free market and the League of Nations. John Leominster was almost genial. It was the kind of gathering he liked best, outside the hunting season. He was amongst his own people, who knew their place, and his. He was pleased with his son-in-law, who would make a decent Member, and with Grace’s support of him. The evening went well.

Cressida went to bed early, after having drunk the cup of hot milk that Nanny Brodribb considered essential to a good night’s rest. She had won a precious twenty minutes with her father before he changed for dinner, and she had heard the news of the day. Grace had looked in for a moment on her way down, and waved a kiss at her.

Cressida pulled the covers up over her head. She liked her bed, and the comfort of sleep.

Alice sat up, watching the guests arrive from her bedroom window. Later she went out on to the stairs to listen, but she could only hear a confused hum of voices, and there was nothing to see but the heads of the footmen passing to and fro beneath her.