All My Sins Remembered (74 page)

‘Would you like that?’ Jake asked her gently.

‘To be like Tabby?’ Alice asked.

There was a little silence. Nathaniel eased his bulk forward in his chair. His big hands hung between his knees.

‘Come for a little while. Keep your old father company through the Long Vac.’

The note he struck was wrong, they all heard it. He spoke to her as if she was the adored child, and not white-faced grown-up Alice in her hospital bed.

‘I think I am too old to come home,’ she answered flatly.

The pressure of their concern was in one way almost intolerable. She longed for them to go away, so that she could close her eyes again. But yet her effect on them gave her some sense of power to be used when she had so little strength elsewhere.

Now was the chance, she thought suddenly. Now was the time to seize an opportunity, whilst they were ready to concede to her. If only she could think of any concession that might be worth the winning.

‘I would like to go away somewhere,’ she announced.

Their faces brightened with the hope of it.

‘To see Julius, perhaps. Would he have me for a houseguest, d’you think?’

To Berlin.

No
.

Eleanor snatched at her hand.

‘You cannot go to Berlin. It is far too dangerous. I only wish that Julius would have the sense to come home.’

Alice, why do you want to hurt us?

They were frightened of Nazism, which was so strong and simple and obvious. Alice lay against her pillows as the protests and reasonings and love washed up against her. She felt cut off from them now, family and feelings, within the walls of her own self-interest.

‘To Clio then, in Paris.’

No
.

But the reasons were different now, and the protests only came from Eleanor.

Clio was living with a man who was not her husband, and an illegitimate baby; living on little money and what they could scrape from hand-to-mouth jobs; Clio had set herself apart from their world.

‘But Clio is very happy.’

It was Jake who said it.

Clio wrote to them all very often, long and affectionate letters that described the apartment in the Marais that she had taken with Rafael and Romy, her writing and the peculiar jobs that she and Rafael took on when money was short, the friends they had made and the city she had grown to love. There were photographs of the tow-haired baby girl, and of Rafael in the park at Versailles, and of herself with a new, shorter hairstyle. These pictures had taken their place, without comment being made, in the family photograph albums.

But Clio had never come home again, and the letters that Eleanor wrote in acknowledgement were short and formal.

‘Don’t you think that happiness is a good influence?’ Jake persisted.

Eleanor bent her head.

‘I think we should let Alice go to Paris to have a holiday with her sister, if that is what she wants,’ Nathaniel said.

When Eleanor would not look at him he picked her hand off the laundered-thin hospital bedcover and held it between his own. He thought of all the times he had done this, and the progress of the years, and the baby that Alice had once been.

‘She can see our granddaughter for us,’ he said.

Eleanor had begun to cry. She would not raise her head but she answered, ‘If you say Alice may go, who am I to say that she may not?’

The apartment in the Marais had only three rooms and a tiny kitchen with a cubicle containing a sit-up bath leading off it. There were interesting views of narrow streets and tall, twisted buildings from the windows, and Clio grew a few flowers in terracotta pots inside the tiny balconies. Grete had packed up some of Rafael’s books together with her paintings of Waltersroda and sent them from Berlin. Rafael put up shelves for the books, and hung the pictures. He acquired some carpentry tools of his own and made Romy’s rocking cradle, and then a neat little desk-table that held Clio’s typewriter.

Clio loved to watch him work. He was deft with his hands, and the logical progression from raw wood to stained and varnished furniture was infinitely pleasing. The rooms were slowly furnished, and became home.

Rafael could not practise the law in France, but he was sometimes able to find legal clerical work, and they both did translations for an academic publisher. They lived on whatever they could earn and on the remains of Clio’s Holborough inheritance, and when that was not enough Rafael worked as a porter at Les Halles. Sometimes Clio sold an article to Geoffrey Dawson or to one of the other newspaper editors, and she also began to write short stories. Two or three of these were published in
Fathom
, although Max Erdmann begrudged paying her the minuscule fee.

‘You are
family
,’ he protested.

Clio retorted in turn, ‘You would not want family to starve to death, Max, would you?’

Sometimes, in the quiet evenings, she took out the manuscript of her Berlin diary and worked on that.

After Romy was born, they divided the responsibility for her care between them. She was a placid baby who cried only rarely. As soon as she was old enough there were simple family expeditions to Versailles and Compiègne, and one wonderful summer holiday on the Breton coast.

Their anxieties were for the condition of Germany, and the threat of war when the Nazis entered the Rhineland.

Grete and Julius were still in Berlin and Rafael’s father was growing older and weaker in his house at the edge of the Thüringer Forest, and Rafael was often made impatient by his enforced exile. Clio learnt to recognize his darker moods, and to sympathize with his fear that he had slipped away from oppression and left others behind to suffer it.

But even so, Clio was to look back on these threadbare Paris years and the beginning of motherhood as the happiest time of her life.

When Nathaniel’s letter briefly explaining what had happened reached them, Clio agreed at once that Alice must come to Paris. They made space for her by moving Romy’s small bed into their own room, and on one sunny Sunday morning they went to the Gare du Nord to meet the boat train.

Alice held her single small suitcase in her hand and looked down from the high steps of the third-class carriage. She was almost the last person to leave the crowded train. Down at the end of the platform she saw Clio, bareheaded in a blue and white cotton summer dress, holding a plump toddler up in her arms. There was a big, blond-haired man beside her. Porter’s work had thickened Rafael’s muscles, making him look burlier than he once had done. They looked like a happy family.

Clio saw Alice at the same moment. She was struck by the change in her. Her broad face was blank, as if it had been wiped with a cloth, except for the dark hollows of her eyes. As they advanced to meet each other Clio was reminded of how Nanny used to dab the baby Alice’s face with a sponge, after nursery tea, long after the rest of them had grown old enough to use their napkins.

Alice was wearing a black shirt and her British Union of Fascists badge. The last group of passengers looked curiously at her.

‘Alice, darling,’ Clio called, and held open her arms.

Alice hesitated, and then glanced around to each side of her as if she was calculating which effect to aim for. Then she lifted her arm in a salute.

‘Heil Hitler,’ she said.

When Rafael held out his hand to shake hers she took it only after a small hesitation, and released it again at once.

They did their best to welcome Alice to Paris. On that first Sunday afternoon, the four of them walked along the
quais
. Romy ran ahead in little bursts, negotiating the uneven cobbles with her hands stretched out in front of her, and then peered back over her shoulder to make sure that her parents were still close by. Strolling French families in good Sunday clothes passed by them, some of them smiling their admiration of the little girl’s mass of fair curls.

‘
Bateaux
-boats,’ Romy called, pointing to the river barges. Her first language was an engaging trilingual mixture.

There were flower vendors beside the steps with wicker baskets full of blooms, and cages of tiny birds, and old men selling balloons and paper twists of coloured bonbons. Pavement artists made quick charcoal sketches and sold them for a few francs apiece. At one corner, near the Pont Neuf, they came to a little wooden kiosk offering newspapers and magazines.

Alice stopped, her attention caught by a newspaper photograph. While Clio and Rafael waited for her, holding on to Romy, she dug in her pocket and held out a handful of small coins to the kiosk man. As soon as the paper was in her hands she spread it out on the smooth stone coping of the river wall. Clio watched her puzzling out the words of the caption with her inadequate French.

‘What does it say?’ Clio asked at last.

Alice held out the paper. Clio saw a queer, nervous, glazed look in her eyes. Unwillingly, she looked down to see what it was that had captured her attention.

The photograph was of Hitler at the Olympia Stadium in Berlin. He was shown in profile, angrily leaving the tribune from which he had been watching the Games. The story beneath the picture announced that Jesse Owens, the black American athlete, had just won the two hundred metres and the crowd in the vast stadium had risen to salute him. Only the Führer had not stayed to honour his achievement.

Clio folded the paper again, and handed it back.

‘I think he is quite right,’ Alice said in a tight voice. And when Clio did not respond she added, ‘The Olympic Games should be a proud competition for the Aryan races. They should not be open to black mercenaries like Owens, or to Jews either. The Führer was quite right to leave the stadium.’

Clio looked down. The sun was still filtering through the branches of the plane trees and making irregular blots of light on the old cobbles. She saw her daughter’s face, turned upwards, and suddenly noticed that she looked like Grete under the baby curls. Rafael was standing a little to one side, seemingly watching the barges pass under the arches of the bridge.

‘I shall pretend that I didn’t hear what you said,’ Clio said.

‘I did say it.’

Clio was reminded of childhood arguments:
I did so. No you did not
. As the youngest Alice had often come off worst in those, except when Nathaniel intervened for her. With the thought came the sudden conviction that what was wrong with Alice was that she had failed to grow up. She was not a little girl any longer, but she had never fully metamorphosed into the twenty-four-year-old woman that her exterior presented to the world. She seemed unhappily frozen into adolescence.

Clio knew that her sister was unhappy. She could feel it seeping out of her. Whatever it was that had caused her to swallow Grace’s sleeping tablets in London was still with her, following Alice’s faltering tracks.

She made herself reach out and touch Alice’s arm, pushing through the prickle of dislike that she felt for her sister’s hostility to Rafael. She could ignore her politics, Clio thought, but not her rudeness to her lover. The arm was solid, almost resistant to her touch under the warm black stuff of her blouse.

‘I didn’t hear,’ she repeated. ‘Come on, let’s go home and have tea.’

They were difficult days.

Sometimes, Alice was like the child she had been in the Woodstock Road. She romped with Romy, rolling her over on the floor or on the bed until the child gasped with excitement, and then chased her the little length of the apartment until Romy hid behind a door or behind Clio’s legs, shouting in terrified delight, ‘
Nein!
Mummy, no!’

And then at another time Alice turned to Clio and said seriously, ‘You must be glad that she is so fair. At least she doesn’t look like a Jewess.’

‘Your own father is a Jew,’ Clio shouted.

Suddenly they found themselves squared up to each other, like fighting cats, ready to pounce. Clio was shaking so that she could hardly control herself but Alice was massively calm, even somnolent.

It was Rafael who put his hands on Clio’s shoulders and turned her away, sending her into their bedroom until she stopped shuddering with anger and her breath came more easily in her chest.

In bed at night, Clio lay against him. ‘I am sorry for what Alice says,’ she whispered. ‘I am ashamed.’

‘Don’t feel ashamed, and don’t be sorry except for Alice herself. What do you think has happened to her?’

At last, Clio answered, ‘Alice never had anything of her own, I suppose. All the acceptable attitudes had always been used up by the rest of us before she had a chance to try them out. This at least is her own. Except what she has learnt or copied from Grace. Alice always adored Grace, especially after she became an MP.’

Clio did not try to resist the notion that Alice’s attitudes were in some way the result of Grace’s influence.

A week went by. Alice seemed determined to test them by seeing how far she could go. At every opportunity she voiced hostility towards all things Jewish. Rafael was quiet and obviously troubled, but he remained outwardly friendly. It was Clio who found it increasingly difficult to be patient and tolerant when her sister was neither of those things. The current of her sympathy slowly dried up and drained away into the sands of disgust.

On the evening of the second Sunday, after Romy had been put to bed, there was a terrible argument.

They had been sitting over supper around the circular table in the window that looked down into the street. Clio made some meaningless remark about the charm of the old houses opposite to them, and Alice leant across to her with combative determination that seemed also touched with weariness. Perhaps at that moment even Alice was bored by the battle.

But she said, ‘French manners, French food, French views. Aren’t you proud at all to be British?’

Alice had eaten her share of the French
pot au feu
, Clio noted. She only answered, with a shrug, ‘Does it matter?’ London seemed a long way from these warm little rooms.

Alice would not let it go, now she had stirred herself up. She had lately taken to wearing a good deal of make-up and her cheeks began to burn under the sallow mask of it. Her bright red lipstick seemed to slip askew on her mouth.