All My Sins Remembered (84 page)

They went to the nearest-but-one pub and sat down at a table in the saloon bar. Julius bought a whisky and lemonade for Isolde and a pint for himself. His head was still full of the sight of Grace with her bare shoulders swathed in fur.

‘Cheers,’ Isolde said brightly, and tipped her glass.

‘How is Pilgrim?’ Julius attempted.

Isolde shrugged. ‘You know Quint. The girls get younger and the drinks go down faster. I don’t know how many pictures he’s selling nowadays.’

Julius nodded. Looking at Isolde he saw that she was still a beauty of a kind. Her silver hair was dark at the roots and her triangular cat’s face was marked with lines, but her manner was still arresting. Several of the pub’s customers had glanced over at her. She might be as old as forty, he calculated, but she had kept her model girl’s body. He felt no stirring of interest in it.

Isolde was examining his face with her small head held on one side. She leant forward suddenly and said, ‘What’s wrong? You can talk to me about it if you want, you know. I’m a good listener.’

‘Nothing is wrong.’

Her warmth touched him, however. He had no wish to talk, but he bought her another whisky and lemonade. Isolde smoked Sobranie cigarettes and chattered to fill the silence. He noticed that she crossed and recrossed her well-shaped legs in front of him and turned in her chair so that the fabric of her skirt stretched over one hip.

‘You are not very like your brother,’ Isolde teased him at last.

‘Jake?’ Julius was startled.

‘Jake would have taken me home and been finished and on his way back to his wife by now.’ She blew out a long column of smoke, and sighed. ‘Or there was a time when he would.’

Julius knew that Jake had women, but he would not have put Isolde on the list.

‘Does that surprise you?’ Isolde’s ankle rubbed against his.

‘A little.’

‘First time was after some bloody private view of Pilgrim’s. Mobs of people, shouting at the tops of their voices, just like always. Albemarle Street, that’s where it was. That terrible portrait of her ladyship and your sister was part of the show.’

‘
The Janus Face
,’ Julius said.

‘That’s right. Bloody stupid. And Pilgrim was being cocky, and revoltingly rude to poor old Jeannie. So I took your black-bearded brother off home with me. Very nice it was too. I saw him a few times more after that.’ She shrugged her narrow shoulders again. ‘And then it stopped. Just one of those things. Ten, eleven years ago now. Would you believe it?’ Her smile had faded. She was looking down into her empty glass.

‘What happened to Jeannie?’

‘Didn’t you know? She died.’

Julius didn’t want to hear how.

Jeannie had been the first woman he had ever slept with, in his digs in Bloomsbury. She had been Pilgrim’s model and girlfriend also.

There was a symmetry in that, he thought, Jake and Isolde. Jeannie and me. He remembered Jeannie’s loosening flesh, and the fox-red bush of her pubic hair, and the way that her appetite had disconcerted him, the innocent boy.

He had not wanted to sleep with her again.

It came to him now that he had never wanted anything very much. The blankness of his life confronted him like a rock wall. He felt that he was looking up the cliff and from side to side, in search of a hand- or a toehold, but he could see nothing, only the sheer unbroken expanse, stretching away. It gave him vertigo. He felt sad for the poverty of a life that had slipped by almost unlived, and he was also full of fear.

All his adult life, he understood, he had been waiting for Grace. Even when she was married to Anthony, he had found some queer resistance within himself that had enabled him to go on waiting. Before Berlin he had even been content, in his passive way. He had been able to convince himself that there was ample time, in some stately and inexorable progress that they were making towards one another, and that in the end they would be joined together.

Then she had come to him, like lightning splitting a rock, and he had lost her again.

He had been right in Berlin. The central passage of his life had indeed been acted out within the yellow walls of the little hotel bedroom.

And the futility of everything else, before and after that, glared back at him from the cliff face.

Isolde was staring at him. ‘Poor Jeannie. She was drunk. Vomited in her sleep, you know, and then inhaled it. Drowned in her own mess.’

Julius closed his eyes. ‘I have to go, Isolde.’

‘One more drink,’ she said briskly. ‘I’m buying.’

He felt weak, as if standing up and walking to the door presented some great obstacle. The two pints of beer he had drunk were gassy in his stomach. ‘Whisky, then,’ he said.

She came back from the bar with two doubles and put Julius’s in front of him.

‘Drink it,’ she ordered.

He did as he was told, like a sleepwalker.

‘All right,’ Isolde said, when the glasses were empty once more. She put her hand under his elbow and helped him to his feet.

Outside in the street she stepped squarely in front of him. Then she swayed forward so that her hips touched his and the length of her body came warmly against him. She took his face between her hands and kissed him on the mouth. Her tongue darted between his lips.

Julius shivered with cold. The feel of her cheek and mouth and her breasts pressing against him was negligible, neither exciting nor disgusting. It was as if both of them were slabs of meat, and he had no more sensation in his own layers of tissue and muscle and bone than he could detect in the woman’s.

Isolde’s hands fell to her sides. She drew her head back. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘That uninteresting, am I?’

‘It isn’t that –’

She cut him short. ‘Never mind. It was worth a try.’ Julius realized that she must be lonely, just as he was.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said humbly. There was no possibility of anything else.

Isolde was pulling her coat around her. Her hair looked greenish under the streetlights. ‘Look. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will anyway. I saw you back at the Hall with your cousin. If it isn’t any good with you and her you shouldn’t wait about and let it corrode you.’

Corrosion was an interesting word, Julius thought.

He felt quite detached from this street scene. He might have just caught a glimpse of two strangers as he hurried past. It wasn’t corrosion. That was too hot and vicious. Atrophy, perhaps, or palsy.

‘You should go right away and do something else.’ Isolde was frowning, as if she were delivering advice of considerable complexity.

As he had gone away to Berlin, and stayed far too long, his senses slowly atrophying.

‘Thank you for the advice,’ Julius said. ‘Maybe I’ll take it.’

She put her hands in the pocket of her coat and then lifted them away from her sides in an exaggeration of her habitual shrug. ‘OK. Thanks for the drinks.’

‘Thank
you
.’

She swung away from him, under the streetlight and into the darkness at the corner.

Clio tucked the package of proofs into her bag.

She had spent several evenings correcting the galleys, sitting in the circle of lamplight at her desk after Romy had gone to sleep. The quiet work in the silent house had made her think of the flat in the Marais and she had deliberately fanned the recollections, as a way of making Rafael seem closer. He was alive, she believed unquestioningly, in a camp somewhere, and he would come back. There was no other possibility to be admitted. She had devised a way of talking to him inside her head, and the long monologues eased her isolation by a fraction.

The little rented house in Paradise Square, Oxford, was empty. Romy had gone to spend the day in the Woodstock Road. Clio didn’t often leave her with her grandparents, because a lively four-year-old was too much for Eleanor now. But Cressida was also there, staying with Eleanor while Grace was away on some Parliamentary tour, and Cressida adored the little girl and had more than enough energy to spare for her.

It was time to walk to the station to catch the London train.

Clio checked yet again that the precious proofs of her book were safely stowed away. Then she looked in her purse, to be sure that she had just enough money for her fare and a sandwich. The sight of a folded pound note reassured her. Clio supported herself with odds and ends of journalistic work, and by editing and proofreading for the University Press. There was never much to spare, but she felt richer than she had done when she had been supporting Miles Lennox.

Clio folded her mackintosh over her arm and locked the street door behind her. She waved to the woman next door who was crossing the square with her baby in its pram, and turned towards the station.

A year ago she had wondered whether it was a regressive step to come back to live in Oxford. But she was comfortable here, if it was possible to be comfortable anywhere without Rafael.

Paradise Square lay at the heart of a run-down working-class area of tiny streets and terraced houses to the west of Carfax in the city centre. Clio liked the feeling of a community that looked out for its own, and at the same time kept itself to itself, and Romy had made friends amongst the children who played over the cobbles and unkempt grass in the square. They lived a quiet and uneventful life together. Clio often talked about Rafael to the child, trying to keep the memories of him alive in her.

By twelve o’clock, Clio was in London. She took the tube from Paddington to Chancery Lane, and then walked past the huge plane trees of Gray’s Inn to the offices of Randle & Cates, the publishers. She passed close by the old
Fathom
offices, although the little magazine had published its last issue almost two years ago and Max Erdmann had moved on to other ventures.

She looked at her watch as she walked up the steps to the publishers’ front door. It was bad timing, she realized with a flush of embarrassment. Tony Hardy would think that she was expecting to be taken out to lunch. He had said any time on Friday morning, and she had taken him at his word. She had had to take Romy to the Woodstock Road and settle her there, or she would have been able to come earlier.

She did not expect lunch. To have her Berlin novel published was more than enough. Tony Hardy’s enthusiasm for it was all the food and drink she needed. Perhaps she could pretend that she was expected elsewhere.

But as soon as the receptionist had telephoned up from her desk in the front office, a door was flung open above and Tony Hardy ran down the curving stairs. ‘Hooray,’ he shouted over the banister. ‘You’re here in perfect time for me to take you out to celebrate. We’ll do the dull bits with the proofs later, shall we?’

He took her by the arm and led her out into the street.

‘I’d like to have taken you to the Eiffel, for old times’ sake. But Stulik has sold up and gone, did you know that?’

‘No, I didn’t know,’ Clio said sadly. She would have liked to have eaten one last
plat du jour
or
gâteau St Honoré
at one of the little tables with their red-shaded lamps. It was almost twenty years since Pilgrim had first taken her there with Grace, in their débutante dresses.

‘The Etoile, then,’ Tony Hardy said. He waved for a cab.

A taxi was a luxury for Clio nowadays, and she could not remember the last time she had eaten a meal in a restaurant. She settled back into the stuffy interior with a small, unfamiliar ripple of pleasure.

Charlotte Street looked the same as it had always done. Clio found herself glancing towards the old studio for a glimpse of Pilgrim slouching with a sketchbook under his arm to the Wheatsheaf, or the Marquis, or the Fitzroy. She didn’t even know where Pilgrim was nowadays. The last time she had seen him was a brief, surprising glimpse at Alice’s funeral.

‘What would you like?’ Tony smiled at her over the serious menu when they were settled at their table.

Clio was hungry. Randle & Cates were paying; the thought that Pilgrim had always steered her to the
plat du jour
made her smile so that the publisher glanced speculatively at her.

It is a celebration, Clio thought. I shall be a published novelist. And then, as inevitable as her own heartbeat, came the wish, if only Rafael could be here.

‘The lobster, please,’ Clio said.

‘And a bottle of champagne to go with it.’ Tony Hardy lifted his glass in a toast. ‘To
Berlin Diary
.’

The proofs were in the bag at her feet. She had made the last corrections with meticulous care. It was hard to believe that her book was passing out of her hands now. After this afternoon it would begin its slow progress into the territory of the autumn list, and the hands of the publishers’ reps, and the booksellers and the critics.

She felt a thrill of protective fear for it. The diary of her first days in Berlin had become a novel, but the knotted roots of the story were inextricably buried within herself. Last night she had typed a small slip of paper to be pasted into the front of the galleys.

For Rafael Wolf.

Clio raised her glass. ‘To the book.’

‘Thank you for bringing it to us,’ Tony said.

Clio had never been quite sure why she had done so. She knew plenty of other publishers, from her
Fathom
days.

‘I think we shall do well with it,’ he told her.

‘That’s why I wanted Randles to publish it.’

Clio enjoyed her lunch. Tony Hardy’s mild literary gossip and news of shared acquaintances reminded her of other times, and made her realize that the months she had spent living in her little house in Oxford alone with Romy had left her thoroughly out of touch with the world. She felt no particular desire for closer acquaintance, because she had no capacity for wishing for anything beyond Rafael’s safety. Her longing for that made other shortages and adversities surprisingly easy to bear.

When they emerged into the mid afternoon Clio found herself blinking in the sharp light after the restful dimness of the restaurant. She rarely drank now, and the champagne and a cognac to follow it had left her feeling sleepy and faintly stupid. They were standing side by side, looking into the traffic for a cab to take them back to Tony’s office.