All My Sins Remembered (52 page)

There was the risk that she might be carried off by one of the young thugs of the movement, but almost none of them was of her class or background. Jake reasoned that she was much more likely to be claimed by one of the scions of Tory families who passed through Grace’s drawing room. He thought that would answer her real inclinations. And once she was properly bedded, this dangerous phase would be over.

It was a reassuring line of thought, but the pursuit of it stirred other ideas within Jake. He sat in his surgery after the last patient had gone home. He took the brandy bottle out of the bottom drawer of his desk and poured a measure into the medicine glass kept for the purpose. He tipped the spirit into his mouth and thought about Ruth, tracing in his mind’s eye the creases that ran under her belly and the mottled veins that had begun to spread over her thighs. He could hear her remonstrative voice in his head.

Then he began to consider other possibilities. Moving slowly, heavily, he stood up and went to his coat that hung from the hatstand in the corner. He took a notebook from his pocket, and referred to it before he lifted the telephone receiver.

Clio knew, or guessed, how deeply Alice was being drawn into the net of fascism. But she did not discuss her fears with Jake and Ruth out of a kind of delicacy, a respect for the Jewish solidity of their family life and shame for Alice. She also had the idea that it was not Alice who was finally to blame, but Grace.

It was Grace who allowed, or even encouraged, Alice’s allegiance to Mosley. Grace had introduced her to him, in her own drawing room. It was Clio’s belief that Grace was drawn to the movement herself, but was too careful of her own position to admit it openly. But through Alice’s membership she could experience it vicariously, in perfect safety. Through her silly, adolescent devotion to her cousin, Alice had become a pawn in Grace’s game.

Clio had hardly seen Grace since Alice had gone to live in Vincent Street, but she felt the old, dissonant chords of mistrust and suspicion begin their deep vibrations all over again.

However, the main reason for Clio’s failing properly to stand guard over her sister was nothing to do with Grace, or even with Alice herself. As the winter of 1932 came, and Clio’s third wedding anniversary passed, she was increasingly preoccupied with the tightening spiral of her own life.

It was a cold winter, and fog-bound, murky chill descended on London and settled in the dingy Gower Street rooms. Miles was drinking heavily and seemed lately to have given up all pretence of working. They had very little money. Resentment against him flared up in Clio when he wasted what they did have, but she smothered it rather than allowing it to erupt into one of the vicious arguments that her husband seemed almost to enjoy.

Clio was weary, and the weariness oozed out of her in a series of small illnesses. There was a cold, and then a gastric infection, and then another cold that she could not shake off. She had almost never been ill in her life before, and the experience made her feel even weaker and more helpless than ever. The days spent lying in the disordered bedroom, wondering when Miles would slam out of the house or come banging back again, were the dreariest she had ever spent. Her sense of a lost, parallel life that they might have lived together if only an elusive detail or two could have been changed was heightened by his occasional kindnesses.

Sometimes he brought her a tray, with invalid food invitingly prepared and a nonsensical poem rolled in her napkin ring.

‘I’m sorry to be such a wet blanket,’ Clio said, trying not to cry as she twisted the scroll of paper in her fingers.

‘Poor old blanket,’ Miles said lightly. He bent over to kiss the top of her head and then slid away, out to the Fitzroy, or Soho, or wherever it was he spent his time.

Jake came to see her and pronounced that she was run down and anaemic, and needed a change of scene.

‘Can’t you get Miles to take you away somewhere? You’ve got no children, no real ties. You could go away for the rest of the winter, to the south of France, or Morocco, even. There’s no reason to stay here.’

‘And there’s no money to take us anywhere else.’ She tried to smile, and Jake did not seem to see the bitterness in it. ‘I shall have to make do with Christmas in the Woodstock Road.’

That year, Miles would only consent to leave London with her for two days. Nathaniel and Eleanor did their best to make it a happy family Christmas, but it was a gloomy festival. Alice came home, filled with a glittering, unfocused brightness that seemed to strike at an awkward angle off all of them. Ruth could barely speak to her.

Ruth had only ever come to spend Christmas holidays with her husband’s parents out of a belief in family solidarity. She always disapproved of Nathaniel’s secular enjoyment of a Christian festival, and this year with the spectre of Alice’s fascism gliding between them all she had tried to refuse Eleanor’s invitation.

Eleanor had begged her. ‘The children love it so. It isn’t Christmas without children, Ruthie.’

In the end, they came. Luke and Rachel were duly spoilt with stockings and too many presents beneath the tree and too much to eat. Over-excitement turned to bad temper and then tears, and Ruth darted her sharp, hard glance at Jake to say, I told you so.

Miles ate as much as he could of Eleanor’s good food, and drank volumes of Nathaniel’s College claret and nineteenth-century port. He was charming and amusing, as he always could be when it suited him.

Clio sat coughing and snuffling on a sagging sofa in the room that overlooked the frozen garden. Staring up at
The Janus Face
it came to her that she hated the portrait.

‘Why do you keep that horrible thing hanging there?’ she asked Nathaniel.

Nathaniel was surprised. ‘It’s a fine painting. He’s caught the look of both of you.’ The old tease of John Leominster was long forgotten. ‘Besides, I’m fond of the man. What’s become of him?’

‘Pilgrim?’ Clio had recently met Jeannie in Charlotte Street. The artist’s model looked fifteen years older than her real age. Jeannie’s news was that Pilgrim and Isolde were in Berlin together.

‘He likes it. Says it is divinely decadent. Don’t know why he wants to be there, with Hitler and all the rest of them,’ she told Clio, and coughed derisively through the smoke of her cigarette. ‘How’s that lovely brother of yours?’

‘Pilgrim has probably seen him more recently than I have.’

Julius had not come home for Christmas. He sent imaginative presents for all of them, and a long letter mostly concerned with his work.

‘Pilgrim is in Berlin too, I believe,’ Clio answered her father.

Nathaniel’s face turned sombre. ‘I wish Julius would come back. It is time he came home.’

Clio tried to be light. ‘Perhaps there’s a reason for him to stay. Perhaps there’s a girl.’ Only it was more likely that Julius stayed in Berlin because it was easier not to see the only girl he wanted, than to see her and be unable to have her.

‘Perhaps,’ was all Nathaniel would admit, without a smile.

New Year came and went. Clio and Miles did not stay up to see in 1933. Miles was in the grip of one of his depressive fits, and Clio did not believe that the new year would bring anything different from the old one, so had no reason to celebrate it.

January was cold, and fog-bound, and the blackened façades of the very buildings seemed to exude a miasma of soot and ice as Clio plodded past them on her path between
Fathom
and Gower Street. On the thirtieth of the month Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and torchlight parades of brownshirts marched through Berlin to the cheers of the crowds.

Clio fell ill again. On the last day of January she got up and went to the office, to finish work on the proofs of the next issue. But by lunchtime she was coughing so much that Max Erdmann came out of his office.

‘Go home, Clio, for God’s sake. Go to bed, and don’t let me see you again until you are fit company.’

Max was being kind to her. It made Clio think that she must be really ill. She put the cover on her typewriter and took her coat off its peg. She walked back through the Bloomsbury squares, where the dripping branches of the plane trees made frayed black lace-work against the yellowish sky.

She collected the morning’s post from where it lay on the mat inside the front door and went up the stairs. Her feet felt heavy, and she tried to suppress the need to cough that sawed in her chest.

She put the key in the lock of their door, turned it and pushed the door open. She saw at once that the gas fire was burning under its little domed hood, but the sitting room was empty. Miles had gone out and left it on. The thought of the shillings ticking away in the meter made her angry. She coughed, and threw the sheaf of letters down on the table.

Then she stopped. The flat was very still, filled with an odd silence that seemed to press outwards on the walls and windows. The sounds she made were amplified beyond their proper value.

Clio walked through to the door of her bedroom and opened it.

Miles and another man were lying in the bed together.

There was a rush of sensations, seeming to make a great noise and confusion in her head. She saw that her husband was lying on his back, with one arm crooked behind his head. The sheet had fallen back to expose his naked chest and the marble-white roll of flesh below his rib-cage. She saw that the other man was black-haired, and that he looked as rough and dirty and dispirited as the husbands of any of the women who came to Jake’s clinic.

Was this what people would do for money? Clio thought.

She had no doubt that this was a commercial transaction.

Miles did not move. He only looked back at her, in defiance, or a kind of relief.

Clio knew that she would remember his exact expression. She would remember the other man’s coarse features, the way his fingers on her bedsheet were rimmed with black. She would remember each detail, even through the tumultuous confusion of horror, and revulsion, and shame that threatened to overpower her now. She would not be able to forget.

The tableau was like some terrible caricature of her marriage, with this man lying prone in her place. Whenever she thought of her marriage she would see this, the two faces staring at her.

She took two steps backwards, with her hand cupped over her mouth. Her fingers were shaking. With the other hand she groped for the door handle. She found it, smooth and hard, and jerked sharply at it. The door closed and she was left staring at the wooden panels. There was dust in the mouldings and in one spot a rash of tiny splinters, like the stubble of a man’s beard.

The unopened post was still lying on the table where she had left it no more than a minute before, aeons ago. Outside in the street it already seemed to be growing dark. She could hear the traffic swishing past.

Clio left the flat and went back down the stairs and into the freezing afternoon.

With no idea of where she wanted to go or what she might do she began to walk. She walked a long way, through the streams of shoppers in Oxford Street and then down the shining wet arteries of Hyde Park. It was intensely cold and she walked quickly, trying to keep the blood moving inside her. The briskness of her movements contradicted her sense of having come up against a blank wall, at the end of a mean cul-de-sac that her life had become. The route did not offer any way forward, or any escape to either side, and she did not see how she could go backwards and undo what had already been done.

On the other side of the Park the trickle of homegoing office workers became a steadier flow. She had no idea where she had been, and could not have retraced her steps. She went into a workmen’s café and sat at a zinc-topped table warming her fingers around a thick white mug of tea. She ordered pasty slices of white bread and butter and then sat staring out through the steamy glass without touching them. She paid for what she had ordered with fumbling fingers, staring at the coins as if they were some unfamiliar currency, and then left the shelter of the café to walk on again.

She had not intended it, and had given no thought to the direction her feet took her, but in the early darkness she found herself standing at the end of Vincent Street. She looked at the lights of Grace’s house, and then saw that there was a taxicab waiting outside. The motor was running and the cabbie had wound down his window. Clio could see the plump cloud of his breath.

The front door opened and Grace bobbed down the steps. She was wearing her furs and carried a leather portfolio under her arm.

Clio took a few steps, uncertain whether to turn forward or back, and then she began to run. Her feet were pinched and blistered in her office shoes and her legs and her chest ached.

She called out, ‘Grace! Grace, wait for me …’

It reminded her of when they were children, running over the sand after the boys, each of them determined not to be left behind, not to come panting and last to the latest discovery.

Grace heard the uneven clatter of Clio’s heels. She turned and saw her running, then put out her arm to catch her. They swayed together for an instant, as if they both might fall. Then Grace steadied them. There was a streetlamp in its blueish nimbus over their heads, and by the light of it Grace looked into her cousin’s face.

‘Come with me,’ Grace ordered her.

The cab rumbled along the Embankment. Inside it Clio felt placid in her exhaustion, with the lights outside swimming in the river mist and the driver’s broad back insulated beyond the thick panel of glass. She was conscious of Grace’s profile rising out of the silver-tipped swathe of fur. In the regular slices of light, before the darkness claimed her in its turn, she could see the sheen on her silk-covered calves and the neat Louis heels of her shoes. Her kid-gloved hands were folded on the leather portfolio.

There did not seem to be any need to recite what had happened.

Are you really going to marry that little queer?

Clio could hear the words as if Grace had only just uttered them.

They were almost at the House of Commons before Grace broke the silence. Her kid forefinger tapped the leather in her lap. ‘I’m speaking in the House tonight. The debate is on women in prison, you know. Will you sit in the gallery to hear me?’