All My Sins Remembered (79 page)

In those hours after they had lain down on Grace’s bed in the Adlon Hotel, it was as if they were following the steps of some intricate and glorious dance. They both knew what the final measure of the dance would be, and they let themselves be swept towards it on the imperious beat of the music.

Pilgrim laid down his charcoal stick and blew the last faint traces of dust from the drawing. ‘There,’ he said.

Cressida slipped off the piano stool and came round to look at it. She leant over his shoulder, resting her chin for an instant on the musty corduroy of his coat. Pilgrim resisted the impulse to pull her closer to him, to hold on to her. He was not used to resisting his own impulses.

‘It’s finished,’ Cressida said sadly. She gazed at the picture. He had elongated her arms and legs and fingers so that she looked like some timid animal, a gazelle perhaps, ready to take flight. But the face was her own.

‘You have made me prettier than I really am,’ she accused him.

‘That is the accepted procedure in portraiture of a certain kind. But you are wrong, in fact. If anything, the picture is less than flattering.’

Cressida blushed, he was charmed to see.

‘I suppose you have to go back to London.’

‘Yes,’ Pilgrim said, because he did.

‘Shall we have a last walk?’

‘Of course.’

They went out into the Parks again. It was a cold day, colourless, with a sharp wind whipping the trees. Cressida strode along in her belted mackintosh with her hair blown back from her face. This sidelong view of her reminded him of Grace, and of the Janus portrait. It was a good piece of work, Pilgrim thought, with satisfaction. Better now and better in a hundred years’ time than the milk-and-water Sargent it had been intended to complement.

‘You are very like Grace,’ Pilgrim said.

‘In looks, perhaps. But more like my father inside, I believe.’

‘Talk to me about Anthony.’ With masochistic fascination, Pilgrim wanted to hear about it from the child’s own lips.

Cressida said simply. ‘The day my father died was the worst I will ever know. They put a black mask on his face to help him breathe, but I thought they were trying to suffocate him. His face was so white. I wanted to see him, but the nurses and Mummy sent me away. He died that night. I never said goodbye to him.’

Pilgrim tucked her cold hand under his arm, but they went on walking.

‘He was a wonderful father. He always seemed to be there, when Mummy was away. He made up games and stories. There was a game we used to play in his study, desert explorers, using a rug to make a tent.’

It sounded a banal enough relationship, Pilgrim thought. No doubt most fathers were capable of stories and games. He could probably have performed in the same way himself.

‘I miss him still, every day,’ Cressida said softly. ‘I still love him.’

He was pierced by her devotion then. The pain of it made him want to bend himself double. It felt just as though an arrow were passing through all his accumulated layers of self-interest and self-protectiveness.

Pilgrim had imagined that he was invulnerable, but he was not. If only Grace and he had been different, he was thinking, he might have been able to claim this innocent affection of Cressida’s for himself. It would be his, and not poor Anthony Brock’s.

He was suddenly burning with jealousy for Cressida’s love for her father. And he was angry with Grace for having kept this remarkable child to herself. He felt that he had been fenced out of her young life, like some marauding animal that must be kept beyond the pale of the village settlement. He held on to her arm, feeling the suppleness of her thin wrist, wanting to hold her and keep her as he had never wanted to keep an ordinary woman.

‘I used to be afraid of my mother. She always seemed to be so beautiful and busy and clever. And also … enamelled, difficult to penetrate. She was very good at making me feel that I wasn’t quite what she hoped for. She still is, as a matter of fact, but I don’t mind that so much any more. At least I am
thin
now. When I was small she used to dress me in pretty, babyish clothes that showed off the rolls of fat. Did she do it deliberately, do you think?’

Cressida was smiling. She had grown vivacious in the warmth of Pilgrim’s attention.

Pilgrim said, ‘Your mother is an uncommon creature. You should love her, and admire her too.’

They reached the river. It was running high, and crusts of foam rode on the back of it.

‘I loved my father best,’ Cressida said.

Capricious jealousy rose up within him, swirling to the surface of all his other feelings like the river foam. Pilgrim opened his mouth. Coldly and flatly he told her, ‘Anthony Brock is not your father. I am.’

Cressida did not speak for a long moment. Slowly and stiffly she detached her hand from his arm. She rubbed her elbow briefly with her white fingers, as if it had been bruised.

Afterwards she remembered the colour of the water, and the fronds of willow branch that seemed to reach out to nip at her hair.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.

Her denial was so complete and so vehement that there seemed to be nothing that either of them could add. They walked on in silence.

Only inside Cressida’s head there was a tumult of noise. It was impossible. The notion was obscene, and horrible. She tried to cling on to the belief that it was impossible, but another much more unpleasant voice asserted that it was not impossible at all. And if it were not the truth, how or why should Pilgrim have suggested such a thing? She thought of the portrait, and the expanses of flesh and waving, wild hair suddenly seemed threatening and significant and nauseatingly erotic. The limbs became her mother’s and this man’s, coupling. Was she the result of that coupling? Cressida saw her father’s face under the black mask, and she remembered the nurses who to her childish eyes had looked like birds of prey.

I never said goodbye to him
, she silently repeated, with a terrible wash of bitterness.

Beneath the turbulence of her fear and disgust there was another sensation. It was not quite relief, but it was close to that, like the reverse of a coin. It was as if some mystery had at last been explained to her. Always, for as long as she could remember, she had suspected that there was some detail in her life that was not quite correct. It was a matter of alignment, or shading, perhaps. She could not have expressed it more coherently than that. And if this were the truth, this blurted malice of Pilgrim’s, it was more than an explanation. She felt as if some black and filthy pit had opened up at her feet.

But Cressida was Grace’s daughter. She had acquired more self-control in her short life than Pilgrim had imagined in all of his. Her white face was the only visible sign of the shock she had suffered. She walked on, and they turned the familiar circuit of the Parks and came back to the house in Woodstock Road.

Eleanor was in the drawing room, fussing over giving Pilgrim a proper send-off to London. Cressida sat down on the piano stool, and then abruptly jumped up again. She resettled on the sofa with her face turned away from the Janus. Pilgrim slipped past Eleanor and held out the charcoal drawing to his daughter.

‘It’s yours,’ he told her.

Cressida glanced down at it, and then laid it aside. ‘Thank you,’ she said stiffly.

For appearance’s sake she went with her aunt to the front door to say goodbye, but she would not look at Pilgrim and she only touched his hand with the cold tips of her fingers when he held it out to her.

Pilgrim went back in the train to London. He stared out through the sooty windows at the receding water-meadows, and wished that he had held his tongue.

Twenty

Rafael discovered from his allies within the Alexanderplatz that Alice was being held in a camp near Berlin. For a little while she had been in police custody, first in Munich and afterwards in Berlin itself, but then she had been handed over to the SS, who had removed her to Sachsenhausen.

Within two days, the same information came from the British Embassy. Nathaniel was assured that everything possible was being done to bring about her trial and subsequent release, and representations were being made about the conditions of her imprisonment to Himmler and to the Führer himself.

They could only wait, in their anxiety, working over the crumbs of information that they had been given, until the meagre facts became greasy and nightmarish from over-familiarity. For Nathaniel and Rafael, who were needed elsewhere and who could do little except grimly speculate about Alice’s whereabouts, the time passed with painful slowness. But for Julius and Grace the same anxiety was shot with a kind of feverish joy. The days of waiting and listening brought them closer together; the dance-step that they had begun on Grace’s first night in Berlin swung them faster and faster.

Nathaniel saw nothing of what was happening. To Nathaniel they were here for Alice alone, and until she was free and safely on her way home with him nothing else could have any importance or significance. Rafael did see, but he said nothing, even in the letters that he wrote to Clio. The quickening pulse of attraction between Grace and Julius seemed only to increase his own sense of foreboding.

For Julius and Grace themselves the beat of longing was amplified by the unsuitability of the time and the place, and by the steady friction of their guilt. In the cold and inhospitable days after Grace’s arrival the pressure of their need grew until they could barely sit in the same room without touching, without blindly reaching for one another. Grace had never known such sharp physical desire, even at the height of her late-kindled love affair with Anthony.

But still they waited. In his new confidence Julius was sure that to wait was all that was necessary, and Grace was stayed by a wish to examine and order and savour this happiness, before it devoured her.

She moved out of the Adlon, insisting to Julius that it was for reasons of economy. Both of them knew, however, that it was because he felt uncomfortable as a Jew in the luxurious hotel that was frequented by SS and SA officers, and even ill-at-ease, in daylight hours, in the surging and prosperous crowds that filled the political centre of Berlin itself. She took a room instead in a small, old-fashioned place closer to Wilmersdorf. It was much less comfortable than the Adlon, but Grace was oddly pleased by the creaking floors and fading décor, and by the three generations of an obliging family who ran it. It was a relief to be away from the uniforms and medals and insignia and the Heil Hitlers of the other hotel.

Grace felt that everything was changing, even her once sure view of the rights and wrongs of the world. She walked in the streets and saw the bright certainty of the faces of the Berliners, and then she saw how Rafael and Julius and Nathaniel moved in the shadows away from the bands of Nazis and their followers, and she wondered how she could ever have believed that this German path was the right one to follow.

December came, bitterly cold, with a wind that penetrated the draughty old buildings and sleet that blew into their faces when they ventured outside.

Julius and Grace became lovers at last in her bedroom in the little hotel.

There were white curtains at the windows, and a ewer and basin patterned with flowers on a marble-topped washstand. Afterwards Julius remembered the details of the room as if he had lived there for many years, as if he had experienced the very central passage of his life within the four dim, yellow-papered walls. He remembered Grace’s white limbs, winding around his own, and the intent, almost inward expression of her face when she took him into herself. She held his face between her narrow hands and looked into his eyes, and both of them saw the reflections of one another, and themselves, and between them and behind them was yet another set of features – the still, separate pallor of Clio.

She was like Clio, and yet not Clio. The likenesses multiplied, and fractured between them, and then were overcome and forgotten.

‘I love you,’ Julius whispered.

Grace straddled him, and he reached up to grasp her narrow waist between his hands. Her hair fell forward to hide her face, and then she lifted herself and her head fell back, and he saw her white throat, and the long curve of her flanks above him. He drove upwards into her, deeper and harder until her back arched and he longed to reach further, until he touched her heart, until he made her cry out for him.

‘I have always loved you,’ he told her. ‘Ever since I was a little boy. From the moment I understood what love is, and what it does.’

Grace was happy, the warmth of it ticking inside her like a flame, but she was also afraid of what he said. She put her fingers over his mouth as if to seal in the words but he kissed the hollows of her palms and rolled with her until he lay above her and her skin and her mouth and the warm scent of her were all his, and his alone. The Berlin street outside their window was noisy with the afternoon traffic but the room was silent except for their ragged breathing.

‘
Grace
.’

To say her name whilst they were so close, with her body wrapped around him, sounded to Julius’s ear like a prayer. He moved again, in a slow rhythm, feeling her heat and sweetness enclosing him. Grace smiled in answer now, a smile that made her mouth curve softly in a way he had never seen before. It seemed that she was ready to give herself up to him at last, after all the years, after he had all but despaired.

The room with its yellow walls and flowered jug receded and left them, together with the street noises and the faint squeak of the old bed, until there was only their bodies, one body, given up to one another.

Then Grace’s wide eyes flickered, and he read in them the first shiver of her orgasm. He felt the slow kick of his own, gathering within him, irrefutable, finally, question and answer, made and completed and sealed between them.

‘Julius,’ she breathed, her own covenant.
Julius
.

Afterwards, when they went back to the Wilmersdorf apartment, Rafael looked up from the chair where he had been sitting reading and saw at once. He ducked his head back over his book, embarrassed by the nakedness of their faces.