All My Sins Remembered (82 page)

Grace and Julius and Nathaniel sat upright on the hard seats of the third class compartment and watched the lights of Berlin slide past the windows. The train gathered speed, and soon they were rolling through the suburbs, where the lights were sparser and the black, empty stretches marked the expanses of forest and water. Then there were no lights at all, and the city lay behind them.

Nathaniel sat silent and unmoving in his corner, just as he had been used to sitting for hours at a time in the apartment. Grace and Julius looked at each other, saw no comfort in one another’s faces, and looked away again. Both of them were thinking of Rafael, and where he might be now, and what he might be suffering and would have to suffer. And they knew that in the early morning, in Paris, Clio and their daughter would be waiting to meet him off the train. There was no word that they could offer each other to dispel either their grief for Alice, or their dread of that meeting.

Grace stared unseeingly into the darkness. She recalled the happiness that she and Julius had allowed themselves in Berlin. It seemed separate from her now, a remote and barely conceivable historical emotion that seemed unlikely to survive under the weight of her sadness and guilt. She felt the old constraints of London, of home and the House and Cressida, beginning to lock themselves around her.

Much later Julius stood up and went to stretch his cramped legs in the corridor. Nathaniel appeared to be asleep; Grace’s eyes were wide open but her head was turned away from him, her gaze fixed on the black window.

The corridor lights were dim. Julius leant against the murky glass and lit a cigarette, swaying with the motion of the train. Then, as they slowed at a crossing, he glimpsed a streetlight in a halo of rain, and the crossing gates, and a sign alongside them that read ‘
Passage Interdit
.’

For a moment he did not grasp the significance of it. Then he slid open the door of the compartment. Grace turned her white face up to him. ‘We are in France,’ he told her.

Germany lay behind them. The train slowed, and lights gathered beyond the windows. When they stopped, it was to let the French customs officials come aboard.

At last, in the dirty light of the very early morning, they reached Paris.

Julius saw Clio and Romy first. They were waiting by the barrier, watching the faces of the disembarking passengers. Clio was wearing a long dark coat and a little hat with a brim that turned back from her face. She was holding Romy up in her arms, and the child reached her fists towards the people that hustled past them. Clio caught sight of Julius at almost the same instant. He felt her catch her breath and then she began to run, pushing her way through the crowds, her head bobbing as she searched for the first glimpse of Rafael.

She reached them, breathless in her haste, with the confusion of eagerness and anxiety and sorrow in her eyes. She counted their three faces, and looked again, still searching, and then her eyes darted to the train and the long line of open doors that disgorged the last few travellers.

Julius and Nathaniel went to her, one to each side. Grace hung back, one hand drawing her furs close around her throat.

‘Where is he?’ Clio’s face had gone grey. Even her lips were colourless.

‘Papa?’ Romy said, in a bright voice.

‘Clio, he … he was taken, last night,’ Julius said.

Clio’s arms involuntarily tightened around the child. She looked dazed, but she was still scanning the faces of the passengers who trickled past them.

‘Taken?’ She turned to her father. ‘Taken where?’

‘We don’t know. He went out to buy some food. Just an errand, two streets away. He didn’t come back.’

The full meaning of the words stabbed through to Clio at last. She half shook her head, as if to deny them, and then all the muscles of her face seemed to contract in a single spasm. Her eyes screwed up and her mouth opened in a cry, the more terrible because it was silent. Shocking, sudden tears swelled out under the black spikes of her eyelashes and spilt down her cheeks.

‘Mama?’

Romy took one look at her mother’s face and then she began to scream. The child’s body went stiff and her screams rose over the station hubbub. Grace came forward and tried to take her out of her mother’s arms. But Clio’s grip tightened fiercely and she swung Romy away, out of Grace’s reach.

‘Pappy,’ Clio whispered, with the mask of tears covering her face. ‘Oh Pappy, what is happening to the world?’

She laid her head against his broad shoulder with the child sandwiched between them, and rocked her, and went on rocking until Nathaniel swayed with them, and the three of them stood on the platform until the first spasm of Clio’s grief had worn itself out and Romy’s screams had subsided into little muffled sobs and cries.

It was a journey like none of them had ever known. The Channel was rough, and the ferry ploughed through the vicious waves that sent sheets of water skidding over the decks. Salt spray rose to blind them as they clung to the plunging rails.

Alice’s coffin had been carried into a closed section of the hold. Nathaniel refused to leave her there alone, and he sat through the crossing in the semi-darkness in the depths of the ship, willing himself and Alice’s body to reach peace in Oxford.

Julius and Grace stood together towards the stern of the ship, where the angle of a rust-browned companionway gave them some protection from the wind and the spray. Grace looked out at the turbulent water, eternally busy like some coiling and recoiling monster, and found herself shivering uncontrollably. Julius moved his body to shield her from the weather, and he leant down to kiss Grace’s mouth. Her skin was cold, and tasted of salt. They drew together, feeling the warmth of one another’s bodies, and remembered how they had made love in the white-curtained room. Not even this journey could quite obliterate those memories.

‘What will we do?’ Julius asked, moving his mouth against hers. He meant when they had reached England and the funeral was over, and there was somehow light in the sky again. He knew that he should not press her, now of all times, but his fear of losing Grace overcame everything, even his grief and guilt.

‘I don’t know,’ Grace said sadly, and her voice was cold, like her face. But she reached up and put her hands to his cheeks.

Clio had been walking the decks. She had found it unbearable to sit in the crowded saloon amongst so many people, and so she had come out into the full force of the wind and stinging spray even though she knew it was too cold for Romy. She carried the child wrapped inside her coat, drawing some comfort from the warmth of her small body. Romy’s head in a knitted cap rested against her mother’s shoulder and her thumb had crept into her mouth. She had stopped asking, for the moment at least, when Papa would be coming.

Clio came upon Grace and Julius unexpectedly. They were utterly absorbed in each other, and she was able to watch them for a moment. She saw the weariness and despair in Julius, and the way that Grace held his face cupped between her hands. The thread of visible intimacy that linked them, the very lines of their bodies, told Clio what had happened in Berlin.

She felt a flash of anger burning through her. In that instant it consumed her grief for Alice and her longing for Rafael, and all she could feel was hatred for Grace like an immense pounding wave surging through all the conduits of her body.

It was because of Grace that Alice had fallen in love with fascism.

And so it was because of Grace that Alice had pursued her love to Germany, and it was Grace’s fault that she was dead.

Rafael had gone to Berlin for Alice’s sake, and the images of what would befall him now had filled Clio’s head ever since he had failed to appear on the platform in Paris.

All the threads of disaster ran back to Grace, like the filaments of a spider’s web converging on the creature at the centre. And in the midst of it, Grace exerted her old, malign influence on Clio’s beloved Julius. He loved her more than he ever had done, Clio could see it even in that single brief glimpse.

Only Grace would not make him happy. Grace was incapable of that.

Clio turned abruptly back the way she had come. She walked into the salt wind, bareheaded, like a wild woman. With Romy still wrapped in her arms she hunched inwards over her hatred for Grace, containing it, like a live coal smouldering next to her heart.

Alice was buried in the little church of St Cross. It was a tranquil place, a green and grey enclosure surrounding the tiny square-towered church. The ancient stone walls of the graveyard were softened with green plaits of ivy.

Cressida stood between Grace and Clio. She had looked down once, over the red-brown earth lip of the grave to the shiny coffin and its single wreath of lilies, and she had felt giddy with the fear of what it would be like to fall in there and to lie helpless and hear the earth tumbling in to cover her. She jerked her head up, fixing her eyes on the grey strata of the clouds instead. The wind was sharp in her face but it smelt of leaf mould and smoke and the rain-marked petals of flowers. It smelt of life.

Opposite her, Cressida could see that Aunt Eleanor was crying. She held a handkerchief up to her eyes and her mouth was twisted. Julius and Jake stood on one side of her, and Nathaniel on the other. Jake looked broad and strong, like Cressida remembered Nathaniel being in her childhood, as if the life had somehow drained and trickled away from the father into the son. Aunt Ruth stood a little further back, in an old-fashioned black costume that was too tight for her. She was studying the Burial Service in the prayer book with a tight, closed face, as if it might contain something subversive. Her plain-faced, clever-looking children were with her. Cressida did not know them very well.

There were dozens of people at the funeral whom she did not know. Many of Nathaniel’s University friends and colleagues were here, and neighbours from the big red-and yellow-brick houses of North Oxford, and teachers and schoolfriends of Alice. Most of the mourners believed that Alice had been killed in a motor accident while travelling in Germany. Aunt Eleanor had insisted on that. Cressida wondered if Alice would have preferred them to know the truth.

Her scrutiny moved on to Julius. He was looking across the sharp mouth of the grave and the heaped-up bank of earth waiting beside it, to Grace. With a shock, Cressida recognized something she had never seen before. Or if she had seen it, she had never understood it. It was a man’s adult longing, raw and urgent and needy.

Had she suddenly become old enough, then, to notice such things?

The realization that Julius’s longing was directed at her mother made Cressida’s throat tighten with dismay and alarm. Her hands were cold, but the palms suddenly felt clammy with sweat. She stole a quick sideways glance.

Beneath the mesh of her black veil Grace’s profile might have been cut in white marble.

The sleeves of the vicar’s surplice twisted in the wind like the wings of a sea-bird. He stooped to the bank of earth and tossed a handful of it into the grave. The cold crumbs rattled on the coffin lid.

It was then that Cressida saw Pilgrim. He was standing a little distance apart from the other mourners. He held his black coat closely swathed around him against the biting cold and the brim of his big hat was pulled down, but Cressida knew it was him. She had not asked Grace for the truth, although she had thought about it constantly. She was afraid of the question, and the answers. Cressida made a tiny, involuntary sound in the back of her throat. Her hand lifted, in the beginning to ward off reality, and adulthood, which hung like twin threats over her head. Then her hand dropped again. Clio saw and heard her, and she put an arm around Cressida’s shoulder and drew her close against her side.

The vicar had read the last prayer. There was a sigh as they bent their heads, and those of them who were able to pray prayed also, in silence. Tabby’s eyes were closed and her lips moved.

When Cressida looked up again it was to see Aunt Eleanor holding a fistful of earth in her black suede-gloved hand. The fingers straightened one by one, and the dirt fell into the grave. Pilgrim had slipped away.

Julius and Grace found themselves alone together in one of the black cars that were ferrying the mourners back to the Woodstock Road. Julius leant forward to check that the glass panel separating them from the driver was firmly closed. He wondered if he was mad, or wicked, because the sight of Grace’s black silk-covered legs inflamed him even now, on the way home from his sister’s funeral.

‘Will you let me come to Vincent Street?’ he asked her.

Grace turned her marble face. With part of herself she longed to say,
Yes, come home with me and we will hide together
.

Julius would warm her and keep off the cold wind, she knew that.

But she also knew that she could not let him. The hope that had shimmered in Berlin, far from home, before Alice’s death, had withered entirely away.

In the wretched aftermath of Rafael’s disappearance she had turned the possibility of marrying Julius over and over in her mind. She had come to the slow and bitter conclusion that it would be a mistake for them to cling together now. It would be out of weakness bred from their mutual sorrow and need.

But there was also another, much older conviction, that came back to her now that they were home. Julius and she were too close. They were more than first cousins, just as Clio and she were too close for cousinhood and yet too separate to be twins. They were the same, siblings and more than siblings deep in their bones, and to marry Julius would be wrong as well as weak.

He had asked her once, long ago, she remembered. On the night when she had announced to the magic circle that she was pregnant.

‘Marry me, not Anthony Brock,’ Julius had begged her.

And Grace had answered that she could not, because it would be like marrying Clio.

There had been a deeper truth in that than she had understood then. There was no future for Grace and Julius together; there had never been, ever since they had been children together.

Grace made herself answer; she had always been able to find the iron within herself.