All My Sins Remembered (39 page)

Downstairs in the dining room the candles were lit. The glow reflected off the massively ugly silver epergne in the centre of the table and softened the faces drawn up on either side of it.

Grace looked down to Anthony, sitting on Blanche’s left hand. His hair was watered smooth. He looked handsome and happy. Then he glanced up and caught her eye. There was a flicker of amused complicity between them that acknowledged the frowsty company, the tedium of the talk, and the sense of their duty being soundly done. Then Grace bent her head smilingly to her dinner companion, the man with the red face. She still felt the chord vibrating between her husband and herself. They were together, working in unison. She loved him; she was very nearly content.

The gentlemen came out to rejoin the ladies almost as soon as Blanche withdrew. It was time for Anthony and his party workers to drive to Ludlow, where the count was taking place, for the declaration.

‘Are you ready?’ Anthony whispered as he draped Grace’s wrap around her shoulders.

‘For anything,’ she responded. She meant that if they lost this time, well then, they would try again, and again. But she did not think they would lose.

They drove back through the winding lanes, the cars’ headlamps cutting yellow wedges through the early summer dark. They found a press of people waiting at the hall, with photographers from the national as well as the local papers amongst them.

‘Lady Grace spotters,’ Anthony laughed, but Grace insisted that they were there to see Anthony, not her.

The other two candidates and their supporters were waiting in a stuffy room at the back of the hall. When Grace and Anthony joined them there was some handshaking and self-conscious joking, and then a tedious wait before the result could be declared. At last they were shepherded in an awkward group out on to the platform where the Mayor was presiding as returning officer. They stood with their heads bent while he recited the preamble in a sonorous voice.

The names came, with Anthony Patrick Earley Brock first in the alphabetical order, and the number of votes cast. Grace was listening so hard that she heard only a meaningless jumble of recited thousands, half drowned by cheering. She looked round in bewilderment and saw Anthony step forward with his arm raised, acknowledging the cheers. He had won. Not handsomely, but he had won.

Anthony Brock, MP.

Grace went to stand beside him, smiling into the flashbulbs. Her heart sang. The dull dinner and the round of provincial pleasantries that had led to this moment were forgotten. It had all been worthwhile. She was thinking of Westminster, and of Anthony’s coming rapid rise through the Parliamentary party. She was dreaming of the Cabinet, and the possibility of Number Ten itself, and of her own role at his side. They stood proudly together on the platform, receiving their due congratulations at the beginning of it all.

Tomorrow, there would be photographs in the later editions. They would no longer be captioned ‘That bright young man Mr Anthony Brock and lovely, party-going Lady Grace.’ They would be ‘The new member for West Shropshire and his wife, political hostess Lady Grace Brock.’ Grace smiled. Not yet, maybe. But soon, soon enough.

The two girls heard the news in the early morning, when they came down to breakfast and found Anthony sitting alone at the table with the newspapers.

‘Oh, how
utterly
wonderful, hooray,’ Alice cried. ‘I knew you were going to win it, I just knew.’ She ran round the table and flung her arms around him, forgetting in her rejoicing to be shy or in awe.

‘Are you pleased, Daddy?’ Cressida asked, muted in the face of Alice’s enthusiasm.

‘You know, I am, rather.’

‘Then I am, too, of course. Congratulations,’ Cressida said gamely. Her plump cheeks looked pinched, as if invisible thumbs pressed into them, leaving white hollows in the flesh.

Clio read the result in the newspaper. She folded the paper and propped it against her coffee cup so that she could study the photograph more closely. She decided that Anthony looked satisfied, in his modest and undramatic way, and that Grace, with her small neat head rising out of a cloud of furs, looked indecently exultant.

‘It sounds like a Labour government, then. I don’t see how Baldwin can hope to carry on, do you?’ Julius said, glancing up from
The Times
. ‘Is there any more of that coffee?’

‘I’ll make some,’ she smiled at him. ‘Is this in yours?’ She passed the
Mail
across the table and went into the kitchen with the coffee pot.

Julius looked at Grace. It was more than a year since he had seen her, much longer than that since they had exchanged more than superficial family talk. He couldn’t even remember when they had last been alone together. But the unexpected thought of her could still dislocate the steady, colourless structure of his life. It was as if he suddenly lost his balance on familiar ground, slipped and had to grasp at the displaced features of the landscape as they whistled past him and he fell. He was a successful violinist, in London for a series of recitals. He was staying in the old flat, with Clio. He had a routine; it was a little anaemic and lonely, it was true, but he was not uncomfortable.

And he was still in love with Grace, as he had always been.

The difference was that simply to love her had once been enough. He had been calm and content, taking pleasure in the knowledge that she existed, and that there was time, and a world of opportunity. But now Julius felt the beginnings of disappointment. He considered his life, and recognized that there was nothing in it but his music. There had been one drunken night, long ago, with that red-haired model of Pilgrim’s. Jeannie. He did not want to remember what had happened. There had been two girls, at different times, in Paris, both of them only briefly. For a long time now there had been no one at all.

I am not yet thirty, Julius thought. And I already feel dried up, as if my bones are rubbing together inside me.

He studied the picture. Even through the blur of newsprint, through the coarse dots that swam together to make an approximation of her features, he could see that Grace was growing more beautiful. The fact that he loved her seemed irrelevant, pathetic even. It was the weary obsession of a lonely man, doomed through his own weakness to worship the icon left over from his adolescence.

Julius smiled, his mouth making a thin curve. He knew all this, and he loved her none the less.

Clio came back with the coffee pot and leant over his shoulder to pour. Julius tossed the folded paper back across the table. ‘They look pleased with themselves,’ he said.

‘Anthony deserved to win. And I’m sure he’ll make a good, solid, Tory MP. Pity for him it will have to be in opposition.’

‘Unless there’s a Liberal coalition.’

They began to talk about the election result. They were circumspect with each other when Grace was mentioned.

They had finished their coffee when Clio heard the rattle of the morning’s post falling into the wire basket behind the letter-box. She left the table and ran to collect it.

When she came back she was sorting a sheaf of letters.

‘Two for you,’ she announced, holding them out. ‘Bills and boring things for me.’

Julius saw that there was a blue envelope in the pocket of her Chinese robe – the same bright silk robe copied long ago from Grace’s wardrobe. And a moment or two later she slipped away from the breakfast table and went to her room, to read the letter in private.

Julius watched her go. He had already guessed that Clio was in love. Her increasingly habitual wryness had suddenly softened into a more gentle hesitancy, and the lines of her face had softened with it. She looked younger and prettier, sometimes almost girlish. She also, he noticed, took much more trouble over her appearance. Her stockings and gloves were carefully mended instead of being allowed to run into holes, and she had begun to wear coloured scarves at the necks of her jumpers, and smart little head-hugging hats. On her dressing table, when he had looked into her bedroom in search of aspirins, he had caught a glimpse of Elizabeth Arden’s foundation cream, and a pot of the vaseline that she rubbed on to her eyelids.

Julius was pleased for her. He wondered who the man could be.

Clio sat down on her bed, breathless with anticipation, and carefully slit open the blue envelope. She had only seen Miles yesterday, when they had lunched rather unsatisfactorily together. He had been preoccupied over his escalope Milanese, although she had tried hard to divert him with
Fathom
gossip, and he had left quite abruptly before the waiter had brought the pudding menu. But Miles often wrote a letter immediately after they had met, especially if it had not been one of their happiest encounters, and his letters were invariably delightful.

She unfolded the thin sheet of blue paper and read: ‘How is the dear little piglet this morning? Has she brushed her bristles and buffed her trotters ready for the day?’ There was a drawing of a piglet beside the words, with a corkscrew tail and a broad smile. ‘But perhaps she thinks that her big bad pig was altogether too bad and piggified yesterday, to run off when she was being so sweet and good in trying to cheer him up?’ Another piglet, this time with a ferocious scowl.

If she does she is quite right, and he sends her herewith a penitent kiss and plea that she will not bother her pretty piglet head with his vain moods. He is worried about his work and his bad debts and 1,000 other boring and unpig-wig details that he would not dream of whispering to her, only hoping that she will forgive him his ill humour and let him take her out for a slap-up piggy dinner just as soon as his ship comes in.

(A cheque any day now, Tony Hardy has sworn on his life.)

In the meantime, shall he slip into the office just for the briefest of minutes this afternoon, perhaps to persuade the princess of piglets to dip her snout into a glass of beer with him?

There was no signature, only a drawing of a rather larger pig, sitting disconsolately beside a milestone bearing the words ‘Too many miles from Clio.’

Clio read the letter twice, and then smiled. ‘Idiot,’ she said aloud. Then she folded it and replaced it in the envelope and put it carefully with a thin sheaf of identical envelopes in the top drawer of her dressing table.

She would have lunch with Miles again today, of course, if he did turn up at
Fathom
. She had tried before now to pretend that she was busy, in the wake of some disagreement or show of bad humour, but he always persuaded her. The truth was that she never wanted to resist him. Sometimes she had to hold on to her chair, or on to the beery mahogany curve of the bar, physically to restrain herself from leaping at him, snatching him to her, because she wanted him so much. And all the time she had to make herself light, and whimsical, because that was what he liked, and never to hint at the dark possessiveness that gnawed at her like a cancer. Sometimes all the nerves in her body screamed with the effort of it.

Well then, she thought. She would see him today because she couldn’t bear not to see him. But she would ask Julius to meet her too, and when Miles appeared she would ask him to join them and the three of them could go along to the Fitzroy or the Hope or somewhere. She could listen to the two men talking, and try to see Miles through her brother’s eyes. It would be a relief, a respite for her from her own anxiety and jealousy and Miles’s pressure on her to be a happy piglet.

‘Have lunch with me today?’ she asked Julius when she reemerged from her bedroom dressed for work.

‘Of course I will,’ he said, so happily that she felt guilty.

The
Fathom
offices looked the same as they had always done. Clio’s desk was heaped with orderly piles of manuscripts and proofs, with her big black typewriter set in the middle of them. Her desk was an oasis of order in the usual chaos of boxes of back issues, review copies, files and dirty teacups. The door to Max’s inner office stood open, revealing his empty chair and overflowing ashtray. Max had already gone out.

Julius looked around with distaste. His own domestic habits were spinsterish in their precision. ‘How can you bear to work in here?’ he asked, but Clio only laughed at him.

‘Shall we go?’

‘Um, in a minute,’ Clio answered. ‘Just let me do something quickly for the post.’

While he was waiting for her, Julius stood looking out of the dust-veiled window into the street. He saw a taxi draw up and a man step out of it. He was wearing a creased linen jacket and dark blue trousers like a French workman’s. He turned and strolled towards the front door, and then pushed it open without knocking. He stood in the doorway, gazing in at them and smiling, as if he belonged there and they were the visitors. He was wearing a red handkerchief knotted around his throat, and he had large hazel eyes and warm-coloured skin. Julius knew immediately that this was the man who had written Clio’s letter.

‘Miles? I wasn’t expecting to see you,’ Clio lied. She tried to make her voice light and teasing, but it stuck in her throat. She knew that Julius was watching her, and cursed herself for the stupidity of bringing them both here.

Miles’s eyes widened. ‘
Weren’t
you? I’m sorry, and now you’re busy, so I’ll just go away again. But won’t you introduce us first?’

‘This is my twin brother, Julius Hirsh. Julius, this is Miles Lennox.’

‘The violinist?’

Miles held out his hand. He had an attractive voice and he spoke clearly, enunciating each word as if it was important. It had the effect of making people listen to what he said, even if it was nonsense.

‘Yes.’ Julius shook the hand.

‘This is wonderful.’ When he smiled, the naturally pensive lines of his face became sunny. ‘But now, I’m interrupting. Perhaps we’ll have a chance to meet again?’

‘Miles, I don’t think Julius will mind if you join us for lunch. Will you, Julius?’

‘Not at all,’ Julius answered, as if he had any choice in the matter.

Clio’s urgent job for the post seemed to be forgotten. She put on her hat and the three of them went out into the early summer sunshine. They walked westwards, through the Bloomsbury streets and spring-green squares, to the Fitzroy Tavern. Miles talked, sometimes dashing a few steps ahead and then turning to face them, running backwards in little half-strides so that he could see them as they walked. He was in one of his buoyant moods, and Clio began to relax. Julius would like him, he could hardly help it, and it was plain that Miles already liked Julius.