All My Sins Remembered (53 page)

‘Yes.’ Clio’s voice cracked. She said more loudly, ‘Yes. I would like to hear you.’

She found herself in the Visitors’ Gallery. It was almost deserted. She leant over the balcony and looked down into the chamber of the House, thinking how small it was. There were men’s bald heads and red faces, and so few women amongst the men. Grace came in, having removed her furs and her hat. She looked up at Clio as she took her seat.

Clio listened to the debate, and at the same time her mind slipped and looped through the nets of memory. Distant events, childhood times, all rose up and haphazardly jumbled with the sharp details of today, and the dreary planes of the last months. She felt rudderless, able to swing with the currents, and her random meditations threw up at one minute an image of children’s initials carved in a desktop, at the next the black fingernails of the male prostitute lying in her bed.

The debate went on. There was so much rhetoric, Clio thought. So many flying words and unpinned ideas that would all drift together in the end, into random heaps, like dead leaves to be stirred up by the wind. She felt cold, and she wrapped her arms around herself and tried to concentrate on the speeches. She knew that she was feverish and that she should go home to bed, only she had already tried to do that and now she could never get into that bed again.

Grace was on her feet. She had taken notes out of her folder, but she did not look at them. She spoke in her natural voice, calm and fluent. She began to describe the plight of women prisoners, their enforced separation from their babies and small children, mistreatment by prison warders and brutal conditions.

Poor women, Clio thought. She gazed down on the rows of men, but she began to see the faces of the women who had swirled past her in the streets that afternoon. With her feverish sharpness of recall she could see individual sets of features, young and old, preoccupied or vacant, hopeful or desperate or dull. Amongst them she began to see herself, as a child and then a young woman, and Eleanor was with her, and there were other women she knew around them, from each of the different strata of her life.

Pity for all of them warmed inside her. She was sorry for Eleanor and Blanche, left behind by the unrolling of time, and for Ruth who could not make Jake happy, and for Alice and Cressida, and desperately merry Phoebe and poor, sodden Jeannie, and Isolde who wasted her brightness on Pilgrim; and she was sorry for herself.

Down on the floor of the House Grace began to wind up her speech. She quoted statistics on repeated offenders and the effect on them of a more liberal prison regime. Her arguments for penal reform for women were cogent, persuasive.

Clio did not feel sorry for Grace. Somehow, as always, Grace seemed to stand apart from her, and to be ungoverned by the common rules. Grace was so strong, and Clio knew that she needed that strength now. She had come for it, seemingly unwittingly, walking blindly through the streets on the darkest day she had ever known.

Grace’s speech was well received. A confused rumble of ‘Hear! Hear!’ rose up to the Gallery as she sat down.

The debate wandered on. So many words, Clio thought again. The confusion of memories claimed her.

When she looked down to Grace’s seat once more she saw that it was vacant, and a moment later Grace appeared beside her. ‘Come home with me now,’ she commanded.

They took a cab, driven by a different man in a frieze coat, back through the foggy streets. The house in Vincent Street was quiet and warm. Nanny and Mabel the cook must already have retired to bed, because when Grace led Clio downstairs the kitchen was empty. Grace made Clio sit in the chair beside the stove while she heated milk and found a tin of cocoa, and it came to Clio that she had not seen her perform any domestic task since the days of carrying trays up to Peter Dennis.

How long ago.

Grace looked at her, and read her mind. She laughed.

‘What a great fuss, wasn’t it? Poor Captain Dennis.’ She gave Clio the hot drink, and then hunted in the dresser cupboard. She found a bottle of brandy and poured some into two glasses.

She settled herself at the table next to Clio. ‘You had better tell me,’ Grace said.

She listened, saying nothing. And then at the end she took Clio’s hands between her own. She rubbed them, looking down at the blue veins and sinews under the thin skin.

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Clio. What are you going to do?’

‘I can’t go back.’

‘Stay here with me.’

‘Not just tonight, I don’t mean that. I can’t ever go back. I feel as if everything ended today. Have you ever had that feeling?’

‘When Anthony died.’

Clio bent her head. Their clasped hands lay on her knees. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered in her turn.

‘Don’t be. I can tell you this, everything hasn’t ended. That’s the bloody point. It goes on, and you have to find a way to manage it. It’s the going
on
, day after day, when it should all have ended, when the lining of your skull and the soles of your feet and your bruised skin all tell you it should have finished for you, that is what is really difficult. But you have to do something just because you are alive.’

‘Is that how you felt?’

‘More or less.’

‘But you went off and got yourself elected to Parliament.’

‘Yes, I did.’

Clio looked at her. There was Grace’s strength, defined and incomprehensible. She had allowed Clio a brief insight into her grief, and she had felt it under her own skin and in her skull so that Grace had almost become one of the company of women. But then she had shifted her position and the chink had closed, and Grace was apart again.
I wish we were closer
, Clio thought.
I wish we could ever have been close to each other
.

‘What will you do?’ Grace asked.

I can’t become an MP. I can’t go back to
Fathom,
or my own home, or to Oxford …

Hectically, feeling Grace’s eyes on her, she began to improvise. ‘I’m going to go away. Right away, from London and everywhere else I know. There are all these paths I’ve been treading, round and round, for so long. I’m going to walk clear away from them.’

‘And so where will you go?’

Don’t press me. I don’t know. I don’t know anything
. ‘Abroad, probably. I speak French and German. I’ve never been anywhere, much. I don’t have any money, now I come to think of it, so it will have to be done on a shoestring, not the Grand Tour or anything like that …’ An immensity of problems seemed to crowd in on her. Where to go, how to convey herself through the maze of ticket halls and cheap hotels and restaurants? She felt her weakness like an affliction.

Grace said coolly, ‘You own your flat, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sell it. You don’t want to leave it for him to live in, do you? You can borrow some money against it in the meantime.’

‘I could do that.’ A step, appearing as if the tide ebbed against a flight of steps in a sea-wall to reveal first the shiny ledge, suggesting the others still submerged.

‘I have an idea,’ Grace said.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m going to Germany soon, on a political visit, to Munich and Berlin. I want to see this
Volkwerdung
with my own eyes.’

‘
Volkwerdung
,’ Clio repeated, giving it the correct pronunciation. ‘Awakening of the people.’

Grace laughed merrily. ‘Come with me. Come and be my interpreter. Just for two weeks, it can be a holiday. We can see Julius in Berlin.’

Miraculously, another step appeared from the sea. It was slippery and shrouded in weed, but it was still a step.

‘I despise fascism,’ Clio said stiffly, ‘and all that Hitler stands for.’

‘How can you despise what you have never seen?’

‘But I would so much like to see Julius.’ It came to her that she wanted her twin more than anything or anyone in the world.

‘Come, then. It’s quite simple.’

‘Shall I?’

Grace unclasped their hands and held out her right, palm sideways. ‘Shake on it?’

The old formula of schoolroom pacts, often broken.

‘All right then, I will.’

They shook hands, solemnly.

Fourteen

Clio’s first impression of Berlin from the window of her sleeping car in the dim early morning was of a city that turned within itself, denying the daylight. As the train crept into the heart of it she glimpsed the ends of brown streets and the corners of squares lying in shadow under brick and iron arches and hidden between the angles of tall brown buildings.

The little light that did penetrate seemed to have filtered first through peat, or tobacco, or coffee, and so become thickened and stained. It did no more than lick the upsides of the ponderous buildings here and there with washes of paler umber and khaki, intensifying the depths of shadows alongside. Sometimes there were stretches of water visible through the gloom, a canal like a ribbon made of the dun sky and then a wider expanse, a lake the colour of chocolate, fringed with the skeletons of trees.

Then the train rattled over a viaduct and a level crossing and she found herself looking up the great open curve of a broad, deserted street, with tramrails fading away in a silvered arc and gas lights still burning as bronze haloes in the ochre fog of the air.

The sleeping car was unheated. As she stood with her face pressed close to the glass her breath made another fine layer of mist, and she rubbed it away with her gloved fingers. The train had slowed almost to walking pace. She saw the ends of apartment blocks with uncurtained windows and yellow lights showing in the murk, a baker’s shop with the mud-brown shutters coming down ready for the day, and an old man with a metal drum on wheels into which he swept the night’s debris from the gutter.

Grace came back from the tiny washroom at the end of the car. She was fully dressed, down to her furs and ankle boots.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked Clio, rhetorically. Clio had been awake most of the night, shivering under a layer of clothes, listening to Grace’s even breathing. She had been cold for so long that it seemed hardly worth remarking on it.

‘And don’t you mind everyone peering in at you?’

There were crowds of people waiting at the crossings now, patient-looking people in ugly dark clothes, and more people in the brown streets beyond. Grace reached out and twitched down the green waxed blind to cover the window. Clio put on her coat and sat on the lower berth, watching as Grace nested silver brushes and crystal bottles in her dressing case and snapped the locks. Her initials GEACB were embossed on the lid.

‘We’ll be in in a minute,’ Grace said, looking at her wristwatch. And as she spoke the train slowed again, and steam hissed through the cracks in the wood panelling to fill the compartment with the smell of damp bedclothes.

Anxious to see, Clio flicked the blind. She blinked at the smoky yellow light outside. The train slid into the Bahnhof Zoo and stopped under a great glass canopy. She could see over the heads of hurrying crowds to little green-painted iron kiosks stocked with newspapers, flowers and glinting bottles. There were posters everywhere, pasted on top of one another, torn and peeling beneath and patched with later additions, headed in thick black Gothic script that competed for her attention. She read slowly, piecing the demands together: ‘Action for a Pure Germany’, ‘Victory to the National Socialists’, ‘
Gleichschaltung
’ – what was that, Integration? The words were vaguely puzzling, as if they were not quite German but some dialect that she had never learnt in her Oxford classroom.

‘Plenty of porters, at least,’ Grace said.

They were lined up along the platform in high-crowned peaked caps, waiting with their trolleys. Grace rapped on the window and pointed to one man. A moment later he was at the compartment door, scooping their bags into his thick arms.

Clio stepped down on to the platform. City commuters jostled past her, men in homburgs and women in headscarves, berets, ratty furs, all indistinguishably muffled against the February cold. The air smelt of smoke, and frying onions, and sweat.

The porter rattled ahead of them, shoving a passage with his trolley. At the other end of the platform Clio noticed two loitering men in brown uniforms with thick leather belts. They wore red, white and black swastika armbands. Hitler’s SA.

A moment later Clio and Grace were in a taxi. ‘Adlon Hotel,’ Grace ordered briskly.

Clio was thinking, Grace doesn’t speak a word of German but she has still taken charge. She knows how to command things, while I just follow on behind.

She leant back in the seamed leather seat while the old Opel bumped over the tramlines. There were gaunt trees overhead and a street paved in square setts, black and shiny in the wet morning. She saw great buildings with dark domes and wreaths of classical detailing and black statues, and all the buildings and spires and heavy baroque ornamentation and even the streets themselves seemed to be made from the same cocoa-coloured stone, everywhere darkened with a layer of soot.

Grace asked, ‘Are you tired?’

Clio turned to her. Grace’s eyes were bright and she was sitting forward, her arm looped through the leather strap beside the seat to steady herself against the jolting. She is excited, Clio thought. All ready for whatever’s coming.

‘No, I’m not tired,’ Clio answered. She remembered the posters with their black, staring lettering and the SA men at the station. There was another group of them here, in a little cobbled
Platz
. They were laughing, and their breath vaporized in a cloud about their capped heads.

‘What is it exactly that you are going to do here, Grace?’

Grace held on to the leather strap and stared ahead, through the driver’s window. ‘Oh, there’s plenty to do,’ she said. ‘People to see.’

They came along a broad avenue that ran between a dense mass of trees. Ahead of them, Clio recognized the silhouetted arches of the Brandenburger Tor, the Brandenburg Gate. The taxi rolled beneath it, dwarfed by the immense pillars, and came to the Pariser Platz beyond, and the Adlon Hotel.