All My Sins Remembered (48 page)

The cheering became a roar.

Cressida’s heavy face burned a dull red. Even her ears were alight under the felt brim. She dropped her eyes to her lap and pulled sharply at the cuff button of one of her gloves.
Luck
. The word reverberated as if a cracked bell had been struck. She did not know how to manage the welter of shame and disbelief and rancour rising inside her.

Grace called out, ‘Adopt me as your candidate. I will serve you, each and every one of you, to the best of my ability.’

Cressida sat mute, trying to hide her boiled cheeks. Clio was applauding with everyone else. Beside her Hugo’s face showed his startled and embarrassed pride.

‘Bravo,’ he muttered, as if afraid that he might be overheard.

The meeting belonged to Grace. There was another candidate for the nomination, but even before he stood up to speak it was clear what the outcome would be.

Grace was unanimously adopted as the Conservative candidate for West Shropshire. She would fight her campaign against the same candidates who had opposed Anthony. Polling day was to be December 18, just a few days before the House retired for the Christmas recess.

Clio stayed at Stretton for four more days, accompanying Grace as she threw herself into her campaigning. The big black car with its blue ribbons and rosettes went everywhere. Clio heard Grace speak in village halls to Mothers’ Unions and working men’s groups, and to clusters of people gathered in the windswept cold of market squares.

Sometimes Cressida came with them. Grace had given her a jaunty little pennant with ‘Vote for Mummy’ printed on it. She held it in the back of the car, and on the makeshift platforms, but she would not wave it.

Each time, everywhere they went, Clio was impressed by Grace’s freshness, her willingness to answer questions if she knew the answers, and her adroitness in deflecting them if she did not. She handled hecklers with wit and good humour.

‘I didn’t vote for your husband and I won’t vote for his wife,’ a man yelled.

‘More fool you not to vote for my husband,’ Grace shouted back. ‘He was the best MP you’ll ever have. And I don’t want your vote if you don’t want a woman to fight for you.’

Grace crackled and shone with vigour. Every day she was up early, eagerly waiting for the car to be brought round. She never flagged or complained of the cold or the bad roads or a hostile reception. Watching her, Clio thought she looked not like a widow but a bride.

When it was time for Clio to go home Grace herself took her to Shrewsbury station. She swept through the ticket hall and booking office, shaking hands with porters and passengers and clerks. When the train came in they kissed each other with genuine affection.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Grace said.

‘You didn’t need me,’ Clio answered.

‘Yes, I did. Wish me luck.’

‘Good luck, Grace. But you don’t need that either.’

Back at Gower Street, Clio found Miles sitting in an armchair, like some hibernating creature in a nest of manuscript pages and cigarette ends and unwashed plates. He was wearing braces over a dirty grey flannel shirt and his hair stood up in a crest as if he had slept too long on it. The small rooms had a musty, vegetable smell.

‘How’s the work?’ Clio asked.

Miles shuffled some manuscript pages into a heap. An ashtray rocked on the arm of his chair and then overbalanced, spreading its contents on the floor.

‘All right. Just starting to get somewhere, actually.’

Clio did not miss the implication. If she had not come home to interrupt him, he might have made progress.

‘That’s good,’ she said neutrally. When she passed behind his chair and leant over to kiss the top of his head he made a defensive clutch at his papers. Clio said nothing more. She opened the windows, letting in the traffic noise from the street, and began to collect up the dishes and cups. She scraped the food debris on to one plate and removed it to the kitchen, where the smell was even stronger. The sink was a mess of tea-leaves and eggshells. She took a brush back into the next room and began to sweep up the spilt contents of the ashtray.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Miles snapped. ‘Do you have to start doing this the minute you step in through the door?’

‘I wouldn’t have to clear up if you hadn’t made such a mess in the first place, no.’

‘What in God’s name is the matter with you? I’ve been writing, not working as a bloody housemaid. Is the state of a couple of rooms in Gower Street really so important in the great scheme of life?’

Clio faced him. Miles shrank back into his chair with his manuscript held back against his chest. She saw that the whites of his eyes were yellowish and his unshaven cheeks were grey. The fingers of his right hand were nicotine-stained. It came to her that he looked miserable. His eyes didn’t meet hers. Concern for him replaced her irritation.

‘Miles, you don’t look good. Do you feel ill?’

His head fell against the back of the chair. He glanced up at her, under his eyelids, then closed his eyes. ‘Yes. It’s a headache.’

She put her hand on his forehead. His fingers fastened around her wrist.

‘Lovely cool hand,’ he murmured.

‘How long have you been sitting here?’

‘I don’t know. Ages.’

Clio sighed. She stroked his hair and he murmured, ‘That makes it much better.’

‘Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?’

‘Yes, please.’

She made him his tea and sent him into the bedroom to lie down while she cleaned up the cluttered rooms. She worked with a kind of patient exasperation. When she had finished she looked into the bedroom and found him sitting up in bed waiting for her. He patted the covers beside him and when she sat down he took her hand.

‘Dear Clio,’ he said. ‘I missed you, you know.’

She seized on the words, her heart lifting. ‘Did you?’

‘Of course.’

She was looking at her Gilman painting of the bedsitting room, hanging on the opposite wall. The bareness of the little blue room made her think of the spare routines of her life before Miles came, and this solid presence now in the bed warmed her out of her irritation. She did not think that she would exchange now for then. Clio stretched out beside her husband and kissed his cheek.

‘I’m glad to be home. Don’t you want to hear about Grace and the election?’

‘Not very much,’ he answered, but he said it pleasantly and she laughed at him.

‘I’m going to tell you, whether you like it or not. She was adopted, of course. I went out to see her campaigning. She was very good, you know. I was surprised by just how good.’

Miles lay back against the pillows while she told him about the village halls and the market squares. She even coaxed him into reluctant laughter with her descriptions of the rustic hecklers and pompous party officials.

When she had finished he looked at her, the same sly glance from under his eyelids.

‘You are impressed by your cousin Grace, aren’t you? Do you know how often you talk about her?’

After a minute Clio said, ‘She has just always been there, that’s all. She is a part of my life. I don’t know if impressed is the right word.’ She tried to sift through the words stacked inside her head, to pin down which the right one might be, but words which had always been her allies faded and crumbled, evading her grasp, and she was left only with a series of images, bright as snapshots.

Grace in her Chinese robe. Grace walking on the riverbank at Oxford with Jake. Grace in her wedding dress, her ballgown, her chemise in Pilgrim’s studio. Grace under the sea, with her face turned up and her eyes and mouth like black holes.

Clio shivered.

‘Are you feeling better now?’ she asked Miles quickly.

He yawned and stretched. ‘I am, rather. I think I might go and have a bath. I said I might meet some people later on, as a matter of fact.’

‘Oh? Anybody I know?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Blue light from the Gilman picture seemed to filter into the room, cooling the precarious intimacy that had sprung up between them.

‘Shall I come with you?’

He gave a little laugh. ‘Do you want to? Would you enjoy yourself, piglet?’

Something pinched inside Clio. In a bright voice she answered, ‘No, you go. It will do you good to go out after working so hard all the time I’ve been away.’

A little while later, bathed and shaved and dressed in a clean shirt that she had ironed for him, Miles put on his coat and went out.

Clio looked in the kitchen cupboards, but she couldn’t find anything left to eat. Miles seemed to have consumed everything. She went back into the tidy living room and stood at the window looking down into Gower Street. She toyed with the idea of going out to see Jake and Ruth, or calling in at the Fitzroy to see who might be there, but the business of going anywhere at all seemed to call for more energy than she possessed. In the end she went to bed with a book, and fell asleep over it long before Miles came home.

The Parliamentary and political history was well documented. Elizabeth had researched it thoroughly from contemporary reports and family papers.

Lady Grace Brock was elected to her late husband’s seat by a narrow majority of eighteen hundred votes over her Labour rival.

She was introduced into Parliament just two days before the Christmas recess of 1929, to take her seat with the fourteen other women MPs of all parties. Grace’s sponsors were the Duchess of Atholl and Winston Churchill. Anthony had been Churchill’s friend, and Churchill had agreed to present his widow to the House even though he disliked the presence of women there in principle.

Women in the House of Commons were no longer a novelty, but there was interest in Grace’s arrival because she was Anthony’s widow and because she had the reputation of a society butterfly. The House was full after Question Time, and the Press gallery was crowded.

John Leominster only rarely took his seat in the House of Lords. He had even less interest in the proceedings of the Commons except when they affected his lands or the old order, and he nourished a profound dislike for Ramsay Macdonald and his government. Today, looking as if he wished he could be anywhere else in the world, he sat in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery with Nathaniel beside him. Blanche and Eleanor were with Clio in the Ladies’ Gallery.

‘I remember it clearly,’ Clio said. ‘I can see it all.’ Her ivory claw hands massaged the velvet arms of her chair in slow circles.

Elizabeth waited patiently. She knew that Grace had arrived in the Chamber at a quarter to four and stood under the gallery at the far end while her sponsors took their places on either side of her. She knew that she was wearing a sombre but elegant dark blue coat and skirt, a plain white blouse and a tiny cocked hat, and she carried her election writ. Elizabeth had pored over the photographs and read every description because she prided herself on her conscientious research. She knew what had happened, but she let Clio tell her again.

‘After Question Time there was a silence,’ Clio said. ‘A whispering silence when we all leant forward, trying to see her. Then the Speaker looked down the Chamber. He called out, “Members desirous of taking their seats will come to the table.” I looked to one side and I saw my mother and my aunt, one profile seemingly superimposed on the other. They were so alike, even when they were old women. Then I saw Grace, walking down the aisle between Winston and the Duchess, and she looked like Blanche and Eleanor too, and I could see my own face in theirs, and I felt the ties between us all as strong as ropes. I loved her, then. I loved her, and I was proud of her.’

Clio darted a glance at Cressida’s daughter to see what she made of that.

‘I’m sure you were,’ Elizabeth murmured.

‘She bowed to the House, and then she took the oath and read out the declaration, all in a wonderful strong voice. I remember thinking, if only Anthony could see her. I knew at that minute she was right to have stood, even … even before the work she did afterwards on improving conditions for women in prison and introducing nursery education for needy children and all the rest of it.’

The old woman’s head sank forward, and one of the bird claws came up to support it. The effort of talking seemed to have exhausted her.

‘You are tired,’ Elizabeth said.

The head lifted again at once, in determined contradiction.

‘There was a dinner party in the House that evening. Winston was there, and Tom and Cim Mosley, and some other friends of Grace’s, but I remember it best as a family party. Uncle John and Aunt Blanche, my mother and father, Hugo and Jake, we were like one family. I can’t remember any other time quite like that. We were all proud of her, you see. Whichever side we were on.’

It was odd, Elizabeth thought, that the old lady should use just that phrase.

Grace waited until the next sitting of Parliament to make her maiden speech. When she did speak, it was with Mr Baldwin’s permission in defence of the government’s Widows, Orphans and Old Age Pensions Bill. It was a good speech, and well received, and it was the beginning of her association with women’s and children’s interests.

She began to make her mark. As her reputation grew, little by little the old criticisms were forgotten. She was not just Anthony Brock’s wife, or a frivolous socialite. She was a politician.

Thirteen

On the face of it, the next years were tranquil ones. Clio went patiently to work, and from
Fathom
to the Mothers’ Clinic, and from the Clinic home again to Gower Street and Miles. Anyone who saw her, even Jake and Ruth, might comfortably have assumed that she was happy.

It was only Clio herself who knew otherwise.

Sometimes she felt that she had no reason to be less than content and so, by the forces of logic, she should actually be content. It must be that her recollection of the exact quality of happiness was imprecise, that her memory tricked her, by favouring what was in the past and was no longer accessible over what she knew now and could not escape from. There was nothing wrong with her life, she told herself, except her own perverse nature.

While these moods lasted she made herself take the slow steps through her routine with a sort of faltering optimism. If all was not well now, then some day it would be. Miles’s book would be finished and published to the proper acclaim; they would find a tune to their life together; she might even have a child.