All My Sins Remembered (88 page)

When she put it on this evening Romy had looked seriously at her. Then she said, ‘You look very, very pretty.’

‘Thank you, darling. But not prettier than the bride, I hope. That would be very bad form.’

‘Prettier than anyone. Daddy would be proud of you.’

Clio put down her comb, her fingers suddenly stiff. She could hear her own words, her constant reminder, coming out of Romy’s mouth. Was it right to keep this hope alive in her child, or should she let Rafael slip away, into the painless recesses of her babyhood? She stooped down and put her arms around Romy, drawing comfort from her, hiding her face from the clear eyes.

‘Thank you. I’m glad I look nice for Hugo’s party,’ Clio said.

Now, in her place at the dinner table, Clio lifted the glass of champagne that had been poured for her and drank half of it. She wanted the bubbles to pass directly into her bloodstream. The white-gloved footman at her shoulder placed a bowl of clear soup in front of her. The finest Stretton china had been brought out of storage. It was white and blue and gold, with the family crest in the centre of each piece. Clio looked up from her plate and saw Cressida.

She had been placed at the other end of the table, on the opposite side, almost as far away from Clio as it was possible to be. Her neighbours on either hand were occupied with separate conversations. Cressida did not seem to be looking at anything in particular. Slowly, but quite deliberately, she lifted her champagne glass as Clio had done. But when Cressida replaced hers, it was completely empty.

At five minutes to ten, Hugo led Lucy to the top of the great staircase where they would receive their guests. There was a newly installed electric switch on a small plaque to one side of the stairs. At exactly ten o’clock, Lucy pressed the switch. Outside, the whole of the great south front was suddenly floodlit.

Electricians had worked for a week to install the dozens of lights. Now, as the guests began to converge on the house, Robert Adam’s serene golden stone façade beneath its crowning dome was bathed in brilliance. The house was instantly visible for miles around, seeming to float in its dark ocean of parkland.

There had been dinners for the ball in all the notable houses within a radius of fifty miles. Every house had its own house-party, and now the guests were arriving at Stretton. Hugo and Lucy stood alone, at the top of the stairs, to welcome them.

There were county people, and hunting and sporting friends of Hugo, and girls who had come out in Lucy’s year and who were most of them married now, but there was also London Society. There were political friends and allies of both Hugo and Grace, from the Lords and the Commons, and there were cavalry officers from Thomas’s world, and the kind of smart young married couples that Anthony and Grace had once been and who were now the contemporaries of Phoebe and her husband. There were the young girls, the débutantes who would be presented at Court later in the Season, with Cressida amongst them, and their brothers and cousins and friends.

Clio watched them all arriving, the family tiaras and the jewels, and the dresses with the trains looped over the wearer’s arm, and the magnificent dress uniforms, and the stiff collars and snowy white waistcoats, and she heard the talk and laughter rising and seeming to gather and concentrate under the cool span of the Adam dome. From the Long Library, where the dancing had already begun, she could hear the music of Ambrose’s band. There was even a dance card in her own evening bag. Hugo himself had given it to her. She had kissed him, after the dinner, and wished him happiness.

‘D’you know, I am happy?’ he said, with the same dazed smile. ‘It seems more than a fellow has any right to expect. Clio, I can’t ask you for a dance. Anyhow, I never was much use at it, even with two legs. But will you dance for me, tonight?’

Clio was touched. ‘Yes, of course I will.’

She wandered through the thickening crowds. There were some people she knew, a surprisingly large number, now she was here amongst them. But there were dozens more faces that were familiar. She saw Lady Londonderry and Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Nancy Astor with her son Michael, and Lady Diana Cooper and Lord Halifax and Chips Channon and Diana and Oswald Mosley. These people must be here for Grace as much as for Hugo. For whatever reason, the world seemed to have converged on Stretton tonight. Their own miniature creation of a world, at least.

The ball was already in full swing. There was an atmosphere of determined gaiety. Clio could almost hear the resolution that was never spoken aloud,
We should dance while we can. Who knows how soon we shall have to stop?

She paused at the open doors that led into the ballroom. She saw Eleanor waltzing in Nathaniel’s arms, and Blanche with Thomas, and as she watched them the colours of the ball-dresses and the flowers and the women’s jewels all seemed to blur together.

For an instant the ballroom became as complete and lovely as an impressionist painting, firmly fixed in its evanescent moment and resistant to closer scrutiny, because when she stared harder at it the perfection broke up once again into its component dots of dancers and flowers and candles in their sconces, and the picture in its completeness was lost to her again.

Clio stood still, blinking a little. As she surveyed this celebration of privilege and counted herself a part of it, she felt no rush of anger that it should be allowed to happen whilst in Europe Jews were being dispossessed and beaten and murdered by the Nazis.

Only ten days earlier, Hitler had invaded Prague. Clio lived with her fears and prayers for Rafael, and with her hatred of the evil that had taken away their life together. But she also knew that tonight was one of the pillars supporting the world she had lived in for most of her life. When the celebration was over, this one and all the others like it, the people would do what was necessary to be done.

The war would come. Those who had been pro-Munich were now no longer in favour, even Grace and her Cliveden friends. Grace was fervently anti-Hitler now.

Clio smiled a thin smile.

It was the faces of the young boys that caught her attention, the eighteen-year-olds who were waltzing with girls in white dresses. The thread of melancholy seemed only to emphasize the glitter, and to make the brightness brighter still.

There was someone standing beside her, Clio realized. She looked, and saw that it was Jake again. He made her open her beaded bag and show him her card.

‘No dances at all? Not a single
one
booked?’

Clio laughed and protested. ‘I’m far too old for this. Go and dance with Cressida.’

The tiny pencil attached to the card swung at the end of its tasselled silver cord. Where was Cressida?

‘I want to dance with you. May I have the pleasure?’

He wrote his initials on the correct line. JNH. It made Clio think of the old desk and the penknife carvings. Was the desk still here somewhere? How long ago it was.

Jake thought, I have never even danced with Lottie. He could imagine the muscled warmth of her turning and humming in his arms. His eyes closed, and her face swam in front of him. He wondered how it was that he could go on sleepwalking through these days and nights.

‘Penny for them?’ Clio asked, as they had asked each other when they were children.

‘Topping band, isn’t it?’ Jake smiled at her.

Julius put down his sheet of manuscript. He had been sitting with it on his lap for a long time, but he had not written anything. The fire had burnt low and then died in a heap of cold ash. He was cold; he felt too chilled even to stand up and go through the mechanical business of rekindling it. There were no logs left in the basket, and the old boy from across the fields who had brought the last load hadn’t called for two days. Two days, was it, or much longer than that?

He drew his coat around him instead. The smallest movement required an effort of will that was almost beyond his capability. On the rag rug in front of the dead fire the dog stirred and then lifted its head to look at him. The creature had given up hope that Julius might take him outside and let him run over the sheep-bitten turf towards the sea-wall. He lay still, whining occasionally, the whites of his eyes showing when he yawned and shivered.

Julius shifted again and looked across at the window. He did not know if he had fallen asleep or if in his solitude he had forgotten how to distinguish the passage of time. It seemed that at one moment there was daylight outside, and the next there was the grey-purple threat of darkness. The repetitive cycle of the hours pressed on him like a weight.

The wind was rising. He could hear it whipping inland, unimpeded, towards the dour mountains. The wail drowned out the music in his head, but the sound of the wind with all the implacable and majestic associations of the natural world came too late to be a comfort to him. He had tried to harness the music and to transmit it through the orderly systems of notation. It had defied him, shrieking ever more loudly, until its crescendo made him press his hands to his ears and rock, forwards and backwards, wishing for nothing more than to be left in silence. And now even as he listened to it, the wind and the music became part of each other.

Julius stumbled to his feet. The dog jumped up at once and stood stiff-legged, with his head cocked. He barked once, and then ran to the window. He leapt at it and strained with his forepaws against the glass.

‘Gelert, boy,’ Julius said.

He walked through into the tiny kitchen and saw that the dog’s bowl was empty. He ran fresh water into it from the single cold tap and then opened the door of the stone pantry that led off the kitchen. The dog came behind him and lapped noisily at the bowl. The shelf in the pantry was bare except for the heel of a loaf and some cold mutton and a covered bowl of dripping. Julius took a tin plate and, working carefully and methodically, he crumbled the bread and then sliced the meat on top of it. He used the blade of the knife to scoop the dripping out of the bowl and mash it into the heap of meat and bread.

Then he carried the piled-up plate into the kitchen and put it on the floor beside the water bowl. The dog ate some of the food while Julius watched, and then sat back on its haunches, looking up at him.

‘Good boy,’ Julius said gently.

He went back into the main room of the cottage. There was an upright piano against one wall, with torn sheets of music manuscript scattered on the floor around it. Julius’s violin lay on the piano in its closed case. He lifted it up and held it in one hand, looking around the room as if searching for somewhere else for it to rest. There was nowhere, and so he stooped to put it down on the chair in front of the fire. He unclasped his fingers from the handle very slowly. The violin case sat upright in his place, like an abstract of himself.

The windows and ceilings in the cottage were too low for a man of Julius’s height, but as he straightened up he could see directly out of the window across the marsh in the direction of the sea. It was almost dark now. There was only a thin greenish line marking the horizon, and above it the impression of weighty clouds rolling in towards the land.

Julius took an old jacket off a hook. As soon as he clicked up the latch of the outside door the dog bounded in from the kitchen and raced out into the darkness. Julius followed him, and in the gloom he could just see the white patches of his coat as he sprang away towards the sea.

The air was laden with salt. A recollection stirred, and he groped for it in the disorder within himself. Then with a sudden clarity he remembered summer holidays, a beach in Norfolk and a little canvas pavilion with a red pennant fluttering above it. There was the rowing boat, and then Grace, lying on the sand with her wet clothes moulded to her body.

Julius’s shivering had become a convulsive shudder. The spasms twisted his shoulders and jarred his bones. The wind seemed to cut into him now, driving him backwards towards the little house and whatever waited for him within it. He took one more step, and then faltered, and then he swung round so the cottage loomed in front of him. A single square of yellow light showed in the lower window, drawing him on.

As he crept back he thought briefly about Stretton. He could imagine the music, dance music, not the clamour that filled his head. He wondered if Clio was dancing, and Grace, always Grace, with her hand resting lightly on her partner’s shoulder. Her head would be tilted a little to one side, as she listened to whatever it was he was saying.

When he reached the cottage again Julius went into the kitchen and picked up the half-eaten plate of food. He put it outside, on the rough ground, so the dog would find it if he came back. Then he retreated again. He closed the door, and turned the heavy old key in the lock.

Clio danced with Jake, and then with Thomas and a handful of Stretton cousins and neighbours whom she had known since she was a child. The ballroom was still a sea of changing colours that wove patterns and figures for her pleasure. It was exhilarating to dance in this warm, shining space with the company of friends around her.

But towards midnight she felt suddenly restless. The heat from the dancers and the candles seemed to fall across her like a smothering weight; her hair was damp over her forehead and at the nape of her neck. But at the same time she shivered, as if a cold draught had penetrated the brilliant room.

She excused herself to her latest partner and slipped away from the dancing. She wandered slowly through the house. The ball was at its height; couples wound up and down the great staircase under the family portraits and sat out in the firelit and scented rooms from which all the dust-sheets and -covers had been stripped off and bundled away. It made Clio happy to see Stretton alive again.

Blanche had been right, she thought. She had made Hugo agree to sell two paintings, a Canaletto and a Lely, to pay for this week of celebrations. Hugo had demurred, but Blanche had insisted. In the end the pictures were sold, and so it was all done as it should be done. There was the new Countess in her wedding dress and her diamonds, and the footmen with their powdered hair, and the hundreds of guests. The great house contained them, serene and magnificent, as it was meant to be.