All My Sins Remembered (47 page)

After they had handed the plates the footmen stood, as ever, against the walls with their white-gloved hands folded in front of them. Clio could not stop herself from glancing at the man directly opposite her, because she had never grown used to talking in front of the servants as if they were carved out of wood. The man’s face was utterly impassive.

‘What?’ John demanded. Clio saw that Grace and Hugo and Blanche were all looking expectantly at her.

‘I think it is a good idea.’

‘It is not.’ John Leominster was not used to being given answers he did not like.

‘Why is it not?’ Clio asked, very gently.

‘Self-evident. Not a woman’s job, politics. If anyone from this family were to stand it should be Thomas. I would have no objection to that.’

‘But Grace can represent West Shropshire just as well as Thomas. And for the very reason that she is a woman, she can represent a wider constituency too. Women need voices in the House.’

‘Thomas has no desire to …’ Hugo began.

‘Bravo,’ Grace interrupted him. Turning to her father she said cheerfully, ‘There you are. I told you that Clio would agree with me. There’s no going back, women are in Parliament to stay. There are fourteen now, next time there will be forty. And I shall be one of them.’

The Earl’s face was turning the same colour as the burgundy in his glass. Hugo frowned and Blanche unhappily crumbled her bread. Clio had only been repeating Grace’s arguments, but it came to her now that they reflected her own beliefs. Forty women members, she thought, and then four hundred, why not? Her admiration for Grace was reluctant, but genuine. She had found herself a supporter.

‘I shall be one of them, whatever you have to say about it, Papa,’ Grace concluded. She was smiling, but there was no question of her determination. Clio suddenly understood the meaning of Grace’s independence. She had left her father’s house. She had been married and widowed, and now she was alone. If she wanted to become a Member of Parliament, if the constituency party of West Shropshire adopted her and if the people voted for her, there was nothing John Leominster could do to prevent it. The recognition of something so obvious and simple almost took Clio’s breath away. She felt like cheering.

John threw down his spoon. Tiny droplets of soup splashed and lay like murky gems on the polished table.

‘Damned nonsense. Damned feminists and suffragettes, meddling in what they don’t understand.’

He was shouting, a surprisingly loud shout from his thin frame. Clio remembered Eleanor once telling her that he had been nicknamed Sticks, long ago, for his skinny legs. The footmen went on staring at the opposite walls.

Grace sat forward a little in her chair. He thin wrists with their prominent knobs of bone rested on the table on either side of the ranks of ivory and silver cutlery still waiting to be used.

‘Who are you to imagine that you understand the world any better than feminists and suffragettes?’

Clio thought that her uncle might choke. ‘I am who I am. A member of the Upper House.’ The Leominster crest winked back at them all from the silver and the napkins. ‘And I am also a man, and your father. I will thank you to remember that, madam.’

‘John …’ Blanche faltered.

‘Oh, I don’t forget it,’ Grace said. ‘But you don’t make the smallest difference, you know.’ She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. Her lipstick left a crimson print on the linen. She stood up, and a footman moved to draw back her chair for her. She crossed the room, straight-backed, and the door was opened for her by white-gloved hands. It was closed again silently behind her.

After a moment Hugo said, ‘Grace will do what Grace wants to do. We all know that.’ He was looking at Clio, trying to draw her back to them. But Clio felt as if she had just seen the grandeur of Stretton, the heritage that had awed her all her life, crumbling down into a pile of stones. Grace had done that, with her singularity. She felt utterly disorientated.

The Earl’s face was still dark red. He picked up his spoon and then dropped it again. ‘Are we going to get any damned dinner this evening?’ he demanded.

Blanche inclined her head to the butler, the signal to remove the plates.

The conversation for the rest of the miserable meal was between John and Hugo, entirely about estate business and hunting.

When Blanche and Clio withdrew and left them to it, they found Grace in the small drawing room sitting in an armchair to one side of the fire with her feet up on a stool. She was eating an apple and flipping through
Vogue
, evidently quite comfortable. Clio wished that she could have exchanged her own experience of dinner for a picnic and a magazine.

‘Grace, how could you?’ Blanche said.

Grace threw her magazine aside and stood up. She went to her mother and put her arms around her. ‘I had to.’

Blanche was not appeased. ‘In front of Clio, too.’

Clio knew that she must align herself. She said tentatively, ‘In a way, Aunt Blanche, Grace is right.’

Blanche pushed Grace away. She went to her chair and sat in it with her head up and her back stiff, as if the seat were a throne. To Clio’s eyes she suddenly looked smaller, a plump little woman with greying hair and too many heavy jewels. She was stranded in a corner of her great cold house, defended by the ageing rump of an army of footmen, an anachronism. Immediately Clio thought of her own mother. Eleanor was getting old too, and Nathaniel, and the tide was beginning to flow away from the Woodstock Road. She had seen it, without recognizing it, but now as she looked at Blanche it was clear.

Her mother and father had always been pillars in Clio’s life, and in their own way so had her aunt and uncle. To see this diminishment was painful, and it left her feeling cold and exposed. She found herself wanting to cry, and she blinked angrily.

It was Grace who had been widowed, and Grace who was striking out. For herself, she was newly married and at the beginning of a partnership. She had not yet discovered what kind of partnership it might be, but there was no need for tears. Old age came to everyone, if they were lucky, luckier than Anthony had been.

‘What will you do about money?’ Blanche was asking in a cold voice.

Grace sighed, and sat down again. To Clio she said, ‘There is some problem about Anthony’s estate. Did Julius tell you?’

‘No.’

Julius had said nothing at all. As always, he was secretive where Grace was concerned.

‘Anthony lost a lot of money in the American crash. Cressida and I are his beneficiaries, of course, but as it happens there doesn’t seem to be much left. The disentangling isn’t quite finished, but it looks as if we shall be quite poor.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’ Clio doubted that Grace’s notion of poverty would quite correspond with her own. ‘What will you do?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Whatever I have to do. Sell South Audley Street and buy somewhere much smaller, perhaps nearer to Westminster. Practise stringent economies, that sort of thing. Might even be rather fun, don’t you think?’

‘Don’t be so ridiculous. Think of Cressida.’ Blanche was angry. Grace had been almost teasingly calm all through the evening, but now she showed an answering spark of anger.

‘There is nothing ridiculous about my intentions. I have thought of Cressida. Being a Member of Parliament is paid work, you know. Would you rather see me selling tea-gowns in Selfridges?’

Blanche had never been good at arguments. Her cheeks wobbled and the soft creases deepened at the sides of her mouth.

She’s a bewildered old lady, Clio thought. She doesn’t understand any of this.

‘You know it would never come to that. If you would only listen to your father, if you would come home with Cressida for good …’

Grace turned to Clio. She looked tired now. ‘If I do what is expected of me, Papa will provide. If I do not, then Cressida and I can’t expect any financial assistance from his lordship. That’s it, stripped of the polite verbiage, isn’t it?’

Blanche put her hand over her mouth. ‘You are so hard, Grace. What have we done that you should have become so hard?’

Grace went to her again, and took her hands. She turned them over in her own, and her red-varnished nails tapped against her mother’s rings.

‘What would you really like me to do?’ she asked softly.

‘I would like you to come home again, to live with us.’ Blanche gestured with their linked hands and all three of them looked upwards, as if into the dark and draughty recesses of the great house. ‘And then, after a decent interval, I would like to see you marry again, some good man who will look after you and Cressida.’

Grace shook her head. ‘I can’t come back here, you know. I’m not a girl any longer, and you can’t wish me back into one. And Anthony was my husband. I shan’t marry again.’

Clio shivered at the flat certainty in her voice.

Grace stood up, laying her mother’s hands back in her lap. Then she bent over and kissed her cheek. ‘Don’t worry. You never know, you might even end up feeling proud of me.’ She had recovered her calmness, but she made it clear that there was no more to say.

‘Clio, we are neglecting you. Would you prefer tea or coffee? Mummy, shall I ring for the tray?’ Then she laughed, apparently with real amusement. ‘One might as well command while there are still those to be commanded, don’t you think? Or would you rather have a proper drink, Clio?’

‘I will have a large whisky and soda. Very large,’ Clio smiled, choosing not to see Blanche’s shocked expression.

‘And I shall join you.’ Grace strolled to the decanter that had been placed ready for the men.

When they had their drinks Grace lifted her glass to Clio.

‘To the adoption meeting,’ she proposed, and Clio took a deep gulp.

The adoption meeting was in Ludlow. Grace drove them there, with Hugo sitting stiffly beside her and Clio and Cressida in the back. John had refused to mention the meeting at all, and Blanche had miserably divided herself between supporting him and recognizing the inevitability of Grace’s progress towards Parliament. But at the last minute, as they were preparing to leave, Hugo appeared in his hat and coat.

‘I can’t sit here and let the two of you and the child go on your own,’ he grumbled.

‘We won’t be on our own, Hugo,’ Grace smiled. ‘There will be the Conservative Party Association of West Shropshire. But thank you. I would like it very much if you were there.’

The hall where they met was dusty and wooden floored, with rows of seats lined up in front of a low dais. A Union flag and a picture of the King and Queen hung above the platform. Grace was ushered in by her campaign manager, the red-faced man with the bowler hat who had also worked for Anthony. She stepped up on to the dais in her silvery furs and then turned to survey the crowd.

As soon as she came in, the dingy room seemed to lighten. People leant forward in their seats and the buzz of conversation grew louder. Grace evidently knew many of the members. She nodded and smiled to them as she took her seat in the middle of the row of officials, apparently completely at ease. Clio and Hugo were placed to one side, with Cressida a little in front. Clio took a quick sideways glance at her. The child sat still, with her feet and gloved hands pressed together, looking straight ahead into nowhere. She was wearing a felt hat that even Grace’s dexterity had failed to tweak to a flattering angle, and a mushroom-coloured coat with a big blue rosette pinned to the brown velvet collar.

The chairman of the local party called the meeting to order. Clio felt her stomach suddenly pitch with anxiety. She focused on the faces in front of her. There were women as well as men, most of them with reddened farming complexions, people of all ages, sitting quietly on their wooden chairs and looking at Grace.

Grace’s campaign manager made a short speech. There was no need, he said, for him to make any introduction. Lady Grace Brock was known to them all as a staunch party supporter, as her late husband’s loyal champion, and as a friend.

Grace stood up. Her hands holding her notes were steady, and her smile was warm, but inside herself she was afraid. Platforms and speeches had been easy when she was only expected to sit at Anthony’s side, in the safety of his limelight. Now she was here alone. The room seemed huge; she was conscious of Hugo with his leg stretched out at an awkward angle, and Clio’s intent face, but they seemed a long way away. She could feel Cressida watching her back.

Her adoption speech had been carefully worked out with her manager and supporters. She looked down at the notes, and saw a series of hieroglyphics. Then she raised her head and saw a woman sitting in the back row, a little woman in a hat like a bun. She remembered that she had talked to her at some party function, and the woman had patted her arm and confided, ‘I’ll vote for you. A vote for your husband is a vote for you, isn’t it?’

Grace abandoned her notes and began to extemporize.

Once she had begun, it was easy. The sentences seemed to unroll before her eyes, like ticker-tape, and she had only to read them off.

‘Don’t look at me as a woman,’ she ordered them in her ringing voice. ‘Don’t look at me as Lady Grace Stretton, or as Mrs Anthony Brock. Look at me as a candidate first. Look at me as a worker, who will work for you and the constituency. I will represent each of you, every one of you, to the best of my ability. Let me go forward to fight this by-election for you; and as my husband did, so will I do. You have my word.’

There was a single cheer, and then a ragged chorus of cheering that gained strength and confidence.

Clio listened, amazed. Her anxiety evaporated. This was Grace, standing up in front of her in her furs and Chanel, but it was also not Grace at all. She saw, for the first time, a politician.

‘I have heard it said that mothers of young children should not put themselves forward in the political world. That a woman who has children should stay at home to care for them.’

From somewhere, a man’s voice called, ‘Hear! Hear!’

Grace swung in his direction. ‘I believe that to be true, sir, wherever you are. This is
my
daughter, here on the platform with me, and I believe that it is my responsibility to care for her. But I feel that someone ought also to be looking after the less fortunate children. My child is one of the lucky ones, and because I know that I want to go to the House of Commons to fight. To fight not only for the men, not only for this constituency, but also for the women and children of England.
That
is my care, and my responsibility.’