All My Sins Remembered (69 page)

Lady Astor swept across the room. She was in her mid-fifties now, but she had lost none of her strong American good looks. She was wearing ropes of enormous pearls, and a black velvet high-necked gown. Her sharp blue eyes fixed on Grace.

‘Grace, my dear gel, here you are at last.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Grace said with surprising meekness. ‘I had to receive a deputation.’

‘Come with me at once. There is someone you must meet. Not you, Philip.’

Grace put her hand on her hostess’s arm. ‘First of all, may I ask you a favour?’

Nancy cocked her head. ‘Yes darlin’, you may. Anythin’ you like, so long as it’s legal.’

Grace murmured to her.

‘Now, you do realize that will destroy my
placement
, don’t you?’

‘If it were possible, Nancy, I’d be more than grateful.’

‘Hmm. I’ll see. Let me introduce you to this charmin’ man, first.’

Grace allowed herself to be propelled forwards. Lady Astor would have denied it vehemently, but she was an ardent matchmaker.

When the time came, Grace went into dinner on the arm of the charming man. The Astors’ dining room was laid for forty people, and it was a candlelit blaze of crystal and silver. As soon as she reached her chair, Grace glanced sideways to see the name on the place-card to her right. Then she smiled, looking down the length of the shining table to Nancy sitting as straight as a ruler at the far end.

Lady Astor had done as she asked, and placed her next to the German Ambassador.

Alice had gone up to her bedroom, but she was not yet in bed. She was sitting cross-legged on her counterpane, looking at her pictures and mementoes. Her wiry hair was loose over the shoulders of the pyjamas she always wore, striped blue and white ones, like a boy’s. Without her face-powder and hairpins she looked much younger than her age.

There were two pictures. One was a photograph of Oswald Mosley, wearing a black high-necked jersey with a row of medals pinned to his chest. It was signed ‘
To Alice, from your friend and fellow-campaigner
’. The other photograph was of Adolf Hitler. Neatly laid out beside the photographs were Alice’s party badge, presented to her one miraculous evening downstairs in Grace’s drawing room by the Leader himself, and a swastika armband, a whistle and a pair of black leather gauntlets. These were the finishing touches to Alice’s homemade Blackshirt regalia.

There was also a folded newspaper clipping, weighted with a small pebble. Alice moved the stone and unfolded the paper, careful not to touch the fragile crease. The newspaper picture showed a group of the boys, and herself, standing a little to one side, in her black beret.

Most of the time Alice thought most of the boys were stupid and vulgar, with their loud voices and bad accents, but on that evening they had been almost brothers. They had been handing out leaflets about Jewish crimes, and the crowd in Piccadilly Circus had suddenly swollen and begun to heave and murmur around them. There had been abusive shouts, and a stone had clattered against a lamppost. More stones had followed the first, and Alice and the others had picked them up and hurled them back again.

They had stood their ground in the shouting and stone-throwing until the police arrived to disperse them. And even then they had marched away, with their arms linked, singing as loudly as they could. It was as if they had won a battle.

Alice was proud of the memory. She had kept one of the stones and made it part of her shrine.

She swung her legs off the bed now. She looked at the door, to make sure that it was securely bolted. She had bought the bolt herself, and screwed it in place. It was unbearable to think of Cressida looking in here, perhaps catching sight of one of her rituals.

Alice picked up her photographs and kissed each one in turn. Then she replaced them, in exactly the right position, and lifted her arm in the salute. At last she knelt down on the hooked rug beside her bed and clasped her hands. She kept her eyes fixed on the pictures.

‘
Here I am. Here I am
.’

She whispered the words over and over again. They were her self-dedication, and she offered herself up more fervently than she had ever prayed to any other God. Alice wanted nothing more than to be noticed, and to be allowed to contribute to the Cause whatever it was she might be capable of. And in all the flowing vigour of her youth and strength Alice believed that she was capable of the greatest things.

After a week in London, Clio went home to Oxford, to the Woodstock Road, because she couldn’t wish herself on Jake and Ruth any longer.

Nathaniel was preparing for the new academic year. There were reading lists and sheaves of papers heaped on the desk in his study, and he set off briskly for College every morning with his bag bulging under his arm. In the evenings there were often colleagues or graduate students arguing in the drawing room overlooking the big garden, while Eleanor sat in the lamplight with her head bent over her sewing. Meals appeared as haphazardly as they had ever done, and the housemaids were always on the point of giving notice. Music from Nathaniel’s gramophone boomed up the stairs, in place of Julius’s practising, and there was the same family jumble of hats and umbrellas and galoshes rising in the hallway.

To Clio the house was much as it had always been, only emptier and quieter. The emptiness seemed to make the house even bigger, and to throw its shabbiness into sharper relief. Dust lay thickly on the oak treads of the staircase, and there were balls of fluff on the old Turkey rugs in the drawing room.

Tabitha was the only one of the children still left at home. At twenty-three she seemed to have settled into an immutable routine that might well continue until she was sixty-three. She taught an infants’ class at a Church school in Summertown, and on Sundays she went to services at a great red church with a pointed spire in Jericho, where she also led a Bible study group. Tabby had always been religious, even as a small girl, but now her Christianity had become the central point in her life. Clio watched her, and listened to what she said, even though Tabby was no more talkative than she had ever been, and understood that her sister was fulfilled by the work she did, and was also happy.
Happier than any of the rest of us, Jake or Julius or Alice or me
, Clio thought.

Lying on her bed in her old room at the top of the house, Clio began to feel as if she were twelve again. The creaks and whispers of the house were so familiar, even the faint squeaks of the bedsprings when she turned her head. She slept, descending unpredictably into unconsciousness, and dreamed of her childhood. When she woke up, in confusion, she thought she had dreamed of having been a woman. Sometimes, she had to run the tips of her fingers over her body, with its different softened contours, to convince herself that she was grown up, no longer dressed in her school serge tunic.

Only this involuntary retreat into childhood did not offer any illusion of security. Rather it made her feel less able to confront the adult fears that were crowding in on her.

She telephoned Julius in Berlin. She could hear the taut shiver of concern, like a bowstring, in his voice. There was no news to tell her, good or bad. He and Grete had heard nothing. Clio telephoned Grace, too.

‘I’ve done all I can,’ Grace said. ‘I made a very strong representation, as directly as I could. To the Ambassador, as it happens. I also wrote to the Führer. Clio, I’ve stepped a long way beyond what protocol allows.’

Clio was impressed, and grateful, in spite of herself, but Grace cut short her thanks.

‘Wait and see if there are any results.’

Clio waited.

She read a good deal, and walked in the University Parks. The trees were turning, in a prodigal display of red and gold, but the flame colours seemed to leap into the air above the branches, making her think of the burning Reichstag. She felt very tired, as if her bones weighed too heavily within her.

If Nathaniel and Eleanor were anxious for her, they didn’t show it. Clio had explained to them, as matter-of-factly as she could, that she and Miles had decided to live apart because they no longer made one another happy. Nathaniel, ever liberal-minded, nodded sadly.

‘I’m sorry, Clio. Marriages should be made to last. But if this is the path you have to take, then your mother and I will accept it, of course. And your home is here, for as long as you need it. Miles is still in Berlin, is he?’

‘Yes.’

Eleanor said, after Nathaniel had gone back to his desk, ‘Perhaps it would have been different if you had had children, the two of you.’

‘It is much better that we didn’t,’ Clio answered.

She also told them that a Jewish friend of Julius’s had been arrested by the Nazis and that they were all fearful for him. Nathaniel read the reports of Hitler’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and the Geneva Disarmament Conference with her, and the Nazi threat to Germany and to Europe became an even more fiercely argued subject around Eleanor’s dinner table.

That was all. Nathaniel and Eleanor seemed detached and serene within their own world. It came to Clio that her parents had tended and nourished their children, had done for them all that they were capable of, and that now they were releasing them, for better or worse. Her mother and father were getting old, and the next generation were preparing themselves to take their places. She felt a small but distinct twist of apprehension in her belly.

In those autumn days Nathaniel was preoccupied with his work and with University affairs. Eleanor went to Stretton for a few days, to keep Blanche company. John Leominster had been ill, with a series of chest infections that obstinately refused to clear, but when Eleanor came home to Oxford again she reported that he seemed to be on the mend.

‘Poor Blanche. John is a terrible patient,’ she said.

At last, at the end of October, Clio went up to London. She had made an appointment to see one of the doctors from the Mothers’ Clinic – but privately, in his own consulting room.

The test took only a few minutes, and the examination afterwards was briskly done.

‘Feeling sick, are you? More tired than usual? Breasts tender?’ the doctor asked cheerfully as he probed inside her. Clio resisted the impulse to wrench herself away and to curl up with her knees drawn against her chest.

The doctor withdrew his fingers and snapped off his surgical gloves. ‘I can’t think what else it might be, in a healthy young woman like you. But call my nurse the day after tomorrow, and she’ll confirm the good news for you.’

Clio took the train home from Paddington. There was no need to wait for the results of the test, she knew by now that she was pregnant. But she did telephone, at the appropriate time, slipping into Nathaniel’s study when he was in College and Eleanor was resting. The test was positive.

‘Between two and three months, Doctor says,’ the woman chirped. And she added, ‘Congratulations.’

Ten weeks, or thereabouts. Clio spread her fingers over her stomach, trying to visualize the shrimp of a foetus within her.

Rafael’s baby.

She knew when he had been conceived. It had been on one of the nights in the inn, up in the Thüringer Wald, amongst the great forest trees. She had hoped for it then, with a kind of secret, gluttonous delight. The hope had given their love-making a fluid, interlocking intensity. Then, in the horrible aftermath of Rafael’s disappearance, it had seemed too much to expect that she might after all be left with something of him.

And now, with the brisk doctor’s confirmation of her pregnancy, Clio felt divided. There was her own body, hard and soft and perfectly familiar, and there was the baby’s, undiscovered, nested inside it. There was her happiness at having this much of Rafael, and her fears of solitude, of having to mother this baby alone, and the fact of its illegitimacy cutting her off from the tidy, arranged and moral world she had always lived in.

For a week, ten days, two weeks, Clio did nothing. She swung giddily between delight and despair. She made elaborate plans for herself and the baby, and then she discarded them. When she lay on her narrow bed and pressed her hands over her belly she thought she could feel the growing roundness of it.

In the middle of November, the letter arrived. It came one afternoon, in a blue envelope addressed to her in handwriting that she recognized as Grete’s, and postmarked Berlin.

Clio tore it open with shaking fingers.

There was a sheet of paper inside, and when she unfolded it a second sheet fell out. It was a letter from Rafael.

He was in the Oranienburg camp, not far from Berlin. He had been in different places, but he believed that this was where he would stay.

It was difficult, he wrote, but not as bad as it had been. He had been moved to a different section and there was more food now. And he had been allowed to write this. He was hopeful, and she must be hopeful too. I love you were the last words of the brief letter.

He was alive.

She read it again, and a third time. There was no mistake.

Clio gripped the paper so hard that her knuckles whitened as she tried to read the words between the lines. He would not have been allowed to write whatever he wanted. The careful message was too guarded. But she understood enough. It was difficult, but not as bad as it had been. There was more food. He had been allowed to write to his friends. He was hopeful.
I love you
.

A thrill of relief passed through her. She was trembling, and her breath caught in her chest. It was a moment before she remembered to look at the other sheet of paper and see what Grete had written.

‘I send you this wonderful news,’ she said. ‘It was delivered to me one hour ago. Now we know, and we can hope and pray for him.’

Clio whirled around. She was smiling, a brilliant smile that ironed the anxiety out of her face. This house was too quiet, much too sombre. The November afternoon was already growing dark. She must share the wonderful news now, immediately.

Nathaniel was teaching. The smooth faces of three undergraduates turned to gaze at her when she burst into his study. She was interrupting their mild pursuit of vowel shifts.