All My Sins Remembered (70 page)

‘He’s safe, Pappy. He’s in Oranienburg, but he’s alive and well. I’ve had a letter. Excuse me,’ she murmured belatedly to the three boys. She realized that they must be staring at her euphoric smile.

Nathaniel reached up to pat her hand.

‘This is your friend Rafael? I’m very glad, my love. This is good news.’

‘The best news there ever was. Excuse me, again.’ One of the boys was grinning behind his hand at the apparition of the madwoman.

Eleanor was in the kitchen and Clio ran down to find her. Clio stood by the old scrubbed table, resting the fingertips of one hand on the smooth wood. Eleanor saw that her eyes were sparkling and she held the splayed fingers of the other hand over the invisible dome of her stomach. She looked away, and then back to her daughter’s face as Clio spilt out the story.

‘It’s good that he is alive,’ Eleanor said, although her mouth felt stiff. She wondered, now that she had seen it, how she could have overlooked for so long the obvious truth that Clio was in love. She had been making pastry and she shifted the floury lump in her hands, and then made a sudden, vicious kneading movement. The dough yielded under her fingers, but the new weight of her anxiety did not move.

‘Everything will be all right now,’ Clio promised her, but Eleanor couldn’t find any answer. Caught in the current of her own happiness, Clio didn’t even notice as much.

Clio telephoned Grace again. This time Grace could hear the relief, singing in her voice.

‘It must have been your doing, Grace. Thank you. It sounds so flat, doesn’t it, just
thank you?
But I truly mean it.’

‘He isn’t safe yet.’

‘I know. But to be sure he is still alive, can you understand what that it is like?’

There was a pause. In the humming distance between them was the memory of Anthony, and all the nodes and connections of the years before and after his death, radiating outwards, a web enmeshing them both.

‘Yes,’ Grace said softly.

Clio was thinking of the portrait hanging in its place in the next room. Two faces forever looking in opposite directions, but the figures seeming to sprout from the same root. The web of associations was thickening, supporting her as well as constraining the two of them. It had been at the party to celebrate
The Janus Face
hanging that Grace had confided her secret to the magic circle. If she was going to confide her own secret, fourteen years later, to whom could she tell it but Grace?

‘I am going to have Rafael’s baby,’ Clio said.

The silence, again. When Grace did speak it was in a carefully neutral voice, with all the reactions excluded from it.

‘What will you do?’

‘What do you think?’ Grace had come to Jake, all those years ago, asking if he could find someone to help her. ‘I’m going to have the baby. I want it more than anything in the world.’

‘Well, Miles was in Berlin, wasn’t he? Surprisingly accommodating of him.’

Grace meant that she could claim the baby to be her husband’s. Grace had married Anthony Brock, who loved her, just to save her reputation.

‘No.’

If Clio had been unsure before, the certainty emerged now, as clear as the air of Waltersroda.

‘No. I won’t pass the baby off as Miles’s. I want everyone to know it is Rafael’s. I’m not ashamed of him, or of our child, why should I be?’

‘Clio, think.’ There was colour in Grace’s voice now.

‘I have thought. I want Rafael’s baby.’
He is not Pilgrim’s, conceived out of ignorance or carelessness and then covered over. Poor Anthony, poor Cressida. Such a long-held, shabby secret. But mine is a baby conceived in love, to be born in hope
. ‘I want him to be acknowledged as his father’s son.’

‘And so. What do you think Eleanor and Nathaniel will say? What kind of life will you have with an illegitimate child? Cut off from your own people? And what if your man doesn’t come back again?’

Clio was smiling. To have her doubts removed was like being relieved of toothache after weeks of pain. ‘He will come back. The baby and I will have each other. I can make a life anywhere.’ Times had changed. She was a grown woman, not a frightened girl. She could control her own destiny.

The sweeping grandeur of the vision heartened her.

Grace sighed. Clio sounded like a religious convert. There was the same blind, bell-like conviction in her voice.

‘I can’t dissuade you, then. But I do warn you.’

‘Thank you,’ Clio said.

The web of memory and association held Grace as tightly in its filaments. Clio had kept her secret. Anthony had never known, and Grace felt gratitude for that every day, every time she looked at Cressida. She sat at her tidy desk now, with the picture of her husband in its silver frame beside her hand, and the silent question repeated itself in her head. Why did you die? Why did you leave me?

‘Grace? Are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m here. Listen. I’ll try the Ambassador again for you, ask some more questions. Now we know where he is, it will be easier to petition for his release. Can you be patient?

The letter was lying in Clio’s lap. She knew it by heart now, and the loops and slashes that made up every word.

‘Yes. You are more generous that I deserve, Grace.’

‘Oh, who knows what any of us really deserves?’

As Clio went to bed that night she resolved that tomorrow she would tell Eleanor and Nathaniel the truth.

She slept much later than usual, after the first untroubled night since Rafael’s disappearance. When she did wake up, it was to find Nathaniel sitting on the edge of the bed looking down at her. He had taken hold of her hand to rouse her.

She became fully conscious, at once. Clio struggled to sit upright.

‘What it is?
What?
’

‘I am afraid it is bad news. Your uncle John died quietly in his sleep last night.’

I thought it was worse. I thought …

‘Uncle John. Oh, Pappy, poor Aunt Blanche.’

The funeral was at Stretton, on a day of thick November drizzle. John Leominster was buried alongside his parents and grandparents in the family vault at the side of the little estate church. The pews were filled with neighbours and tenants, and his coffin was carried by his sons and his estate workers. Blanche sat at the front of the church, a heavy veil covering her face, with Grace and Phoebe supporting her on either side. She looked smaller than the statuesque woman Clio remembered.

All the Hirshes were at the funeral except for Julius, and Ruth, who stayed at home with the children in Islington. For once, Alice’s black shirt and beret did not invite any comments.

When it was over, Jake and Clio and Grace withdrew to the old schoolroom. No one suggested it; they were drawn there as if by gravity. The battered desks with their carved initials were still in place. Clio supposed they were waiting there for Hugo’s children, if the new Earl of Leominster were ever to marry and father any.

CBAGH. She remembered the feel of the penknife in her hand, the way the pearl handle had bitten into her palm as she scratched away. CEACS. Grace’s initials were more elegantly carved.

The waistband of her black costume skirt felt uncomfortably tight and she reached under her coat to undo the top button. Clio’s mouth curled slightly. She didn’t think there was much likelihood that her own son would sit here in his turn, playing and plotting with his Stretton cousins.

Jake was watching her. ‘You are going to be showing soon,’ he said.

Clio had told him the news the night before, when Eleanor and Nathaniel were sitting with Blanche. His concern had been medical first, and practical thereafter.

‘When is it due?’

‘In May.’

‘Are you getting proper attention?’

‘I went to see David Douglas.’

‘He’s good enough. What about everything else?’

‘It will be Rafael’s baby. Pappy and Mama and Aunt Blanche and Hugo and Miles and everyone else will have to accept that.’

Jake and Clio looked at each other. ‘Hugo doesn’t matter a toss, and I don’t suppose Aunt Blanche does either. Miles has forfeited the right to any consideration. But it will hurt the parents, you know. Mama especially,’ Jake said.

‘I can’t help it,’ Clio responded, setting her mouth in a straight line. ‘There isn’t any other way to do it.’

While they were still talking the door opened. Cressida materialized in the doorway, but she had clearly been expecting the room to be empty.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said in confusion. ‘I didn’t think anyone ever came up here.’

Jake smiled at her. ‘Is this your retreat too? We used always to think of it as our place, when we were children.’

In her black dress Cressida looked taller and thinner, and the moons of flesh that had padded her face were beginning to dissolve, to reveal the bones beneath. She was no longer a dumpy little girl.

‘Look,’ Grace said. She took Cressida’s hand and led her to the desks, pointing to the carvings with her red fingernail.

Clio saw something then that she had never noticed before. It was Grace who was the eager one. Grace wanted Cressida to see this evidence of her own girlhood, and she watched her daughter’s face for the reflections of her feelings. But Cressida looked closed-in, her newly clear features walled with a kind of stubborn endurance.

‘I know. I’ve seen them.’ She removed her hand and put it out of reach in the pocket of her dress. Grace shrugged slightly and turned away.

Clio thought of her own child, enclosed within the bands of muscle and mysterious amniotic sea. It will be different, for you and me, she promised. A silent dialogue had begun between them. The baby answered her with the powerful assertion of his existence and his growth, every hour of every day.

Cressida said with a faint bleat of accusation, ‘Grandma is crying. Aunt Phoebe and Aunt Eleanor are looking after her.’

‘I had better go,’ Grace sighed.

Left alone with Jake, Clio pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the window. The great trees of the park retained only a few flags of leaves, and the grass was already bitten with cold.

‘I will tell them,’ she said.

Jake sighed. ‘On your own head,’ he warned her.

It was not easy to find Nathaniel and Eleanor alone, in the great house filled with Stretton children who circled numbly round Blanche and her grief. But in the evening, after dinner, Clio discovered her parents sitting together in the salon. They had withdrawn there with their coffee after Blanche had been put to bed with a sedative.

It was a chill room heavy with gilt and slippery damask, where the Sargent portrait of the Misses Holborough forever confronted the blank panel intended for Pilgrim’s picture. Clio sipped from the cup that Eleanor had handed her and studied the Sargent. The innocent girls posed on the love seat in their cream and sky-blue satins and silk belonged to an age so distant that it was almost forgotten. The Misses Holborough of Holborough Hall were Victorians. The recollection gave Clio a shivery premonition that what was coming would be painful for all of them.

She drew up an ottoman that was itself padded and buttoned like a Victorian matron.

‘Pappy, Mama, I have to tell you something.’

Eleanor’s fingers came up to her mouth. Her eyelids were already swollen from weeping with her sister. Clio began, haltingly at first and then with growing fluency, to tell her parents what had happened in Germany.

Her premonition was correct.

Eleanor was frightened and deeply shocked and disappointed, and the confusion of her feelings found its expression in anger. Clio could not remember ever having seen her mother so angry.

‘You may not do this. You are
my daughter
.’

‘It is already done,’ Nathaniel said sadly.

Eleanor would listen to no one. ‘Who is this man? He is a Jewish activist, interned by the Nazis …’

Nathaniel put a warning hand on her arm.

‘I am proud of him,’ Clio said quietly. ‘And you would be too, if you knew him.’

‘
Proud?
After he has done this to my daughter? I tell you I would not even spit in his direction.’

‘Mama, don’t say things that you will regret …’

‘I have nothing to regret.
I
have been a good wife and a patient mother. And you, you are a married woman also. You have responsibilities, as I have to your father. A marriage is for life, not for a whim, to be thrown off when it gives you a moment’s displeasure.’

Clio spread her fingers over the clammy, cold stuff of the ottoman. She was searching for the right words to throw a precarious bridge over this chasm of a generation. It seemed vital that there should be some link, even if it was only a thread of honesty, a gossamer filament from a spider’s web.

‘I made a mistake when I married Miles. I have paid for that mistake, believe me. And now I have fallen in love, and I am expecting this man’s baby. I want my child to know his proper antecedents and to be proud of them, as he should be. I want to bring him up to his proper heritage.’

Eleanor stared at her. Her mouth hung a little open in her distress, her lower lip shiny with spittle or tears.

‘Not under my roof,’ her mother whispered.

Clio bowed her head. ‘I believe that women should be free to accept responsibility for themselves. This is my decision. Can you at least allow me the right to decide my own life?’

‘Not in this shameful way,’ Eleanor said.

Clio understood, then, that it was Miss Holborough of Holborough Hall who spoke to her, across the divide of a century. Eleanor was the daughter of a country baronet who had daringly married out of her class and her world, but who yet had lived every day of her life within the strict bounds of her parents’ morality. Eleanor had never dreamed or wished to break out of those bounds, and Clio knew that she could not blame her for her anger at her daughter’s default.

It will be different for us
, she promised the baby. Every minute he was growing, tiny fingers sprouting from budded fists of flesh, fingernails like translucent rosy shells …

She edged forward on the hard ottoman. She wanted suddenly to lay her head in her mother’s lap, to have her stroke her hair and soothe her, as she had done when she was a little girl.