All My Sins Remembered (89 page)

As it was meant to be tonight. After tonight, how many more evenings like this one would there be?

Clio shivered again. A cold finger touched her spine. The division between her happiness and her fear was so fine that she felt herself vibrate between the twin magnetic poles, an oscillation so fine as to be invisible, but she was still possessed by it. She saw all the brightness of tonight, and even as she looked into its lovely face she saw another reflection, a mirror image, where the soft flesh had peeled away to show the terrible and savage bone beneath.

She caught her breath and looked behind her, as if the embodiment of her fears might stalk her through the golden glow of the ball. But there were only smiling faces, familiar and unfamiliar, pink with champagne and the exertions of dancing and pleasure. There was no skull-face visible in the crowd.

The doors of the salon stood open on to the terrace. A marquee had been erected on the smooth grass below and an awning covered the stone steps leading down to it. Clio passed out of the terrace doors and under the awning. There were round tables set out in the marquee and hired staff were busy here, under the eye of the butler, preparing to serve supper. A noisy party of what looked like Phoebe’s friends was already in possession of one of the tables. Clio wandered out again, sensing the movement of the evening around her like a tide. She stepped aside, from beneath the shelter of the awning, to look up at the front of the house. The stone shimmered under the floodlights and the windows gave back their own light.

When she turned to look out into the blackness of the park she felt that the house was a liner sailing in some dark sea.

Cressida had been sitting at the far end of the terrace, huddled on one of the mossy stone seats in a semi-circular niche. When she saw Clio standing alone with her face turned out to the darkness she jumped up and ran towards her. The hem of her golden-yellow bridesmaid’s dress brushed over the paving. The clipping of her satin slippers as she hurried sounded remote, as if even her footsteps belonged to someone else.

‘Cressida? Is that you?’ Clio was startled. ‘How long have you been out here?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t remember how long.’

Clio looked at her. ‘Aren’t you frozen with cold? With only that thin wrap?’

Cressida repeated, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’ Then she laughed, a jagged laugh that was too old for her, without any humour in it. ‘I don’t know anything at all. What can you tell me, Clio?’

Clio looked harder at her. She remembered how Cressida had emptied her champagne glass at the dinner table in one swallow. There must have been several more glasses since then.

‘Come inside with me, now,’ she said gently.

Cressida followed her meekly enough. When they stepped into the salon she shrank in the blaze of light and then half turned back towards the shelter of the darkness. Clio could see that she had been crying. There were tear-marks in the dusting of face-powder that Grace had permitted her to apply.

‘You need to come and get warm, darling. See, your teeth are chattering.’

Cressida felt as if the eyes of every one of the overdressed and raucous people in the room were fixed on her. She muttered, ‘Can we go somewhere? Away from all this stupid show?’

‘Of course we can. Come up to my bedroom and we’ll sit by the fire.’

For once there were enough servants in the house for fires to have been lit in all the bedroom grates. Amongst Clio’s more vivid recent memories of Stretton were bedtimes so cold that frost flowers bloomed on the insides of the windows.

They passed beneath the portrait of the Misses Holborough. It had been cleaned especially for the ball, and the innocent identical faces looked as fresh as they had done when Sargent painted them. Clio glanced up at it, and by automatic reaction at the opposite and corresponding empty space. Cressida kept her swollen eyes fixed grimly on the floor.

When they reached her bedroom Clio went straight to the tallboy and took out a thick woollen cardigan. Tabby had knitted it for her. She put it around Cressida’s shoulders, wondering at the same time if Tabby was dancing or if she had managed to extricate herself and achieve the no doubt longed-for sanctuary of her own bedroom.

‘Sit down here,’ Clio commanded. There was a little sofa beside the fire.

Cressida sat, and at once shaded her eyes with her hands.

‘I thought I would drink some champagne and be delicious fun and dance and flirt like all the others,’ she muttered.

The other débutantes, Clio supposed.

‘All I feel is
sick
.’

‘Are you going to be sick?’

Cressida shook her head. ‘Clio, can I ask you something?’

‘Of course you can. Anything you like.’

Some question about love, or sex. What had Grace told her, or omitted to tell her?

Cressida’s head was bent. Clio saw that there was a tiny dark blot on the glowing folds of her full skirt, and then a second one spread beside it. Cressida was crying again. Her weeping seemed worse for its very silence. Clio left her seat and knelt on the floor in front of her. She tried to take her hands between her own, but Cressida’s arms were rigid and the fingers still shielded her eyes.

‘What is it you wanted to ask me?’

Cressida took a breath. The question had reverberated within her head for so long, and now she wasn’t sure if she could bring it out into the plain world of matter-of-fact enquiry and response.

Clio waited patiently.

At last, roughly and without lifting her head, Cressida said, ‘Who is my real father? My father, or Pilgrim?’

In the silence that followed they could hear the music of the band like a whisper or an echo.

When Clio couldn’t answer her because there was no breath in her lungs, Cressida did look up, and then demanded, ‘Well?’

Clio knew that her silence was as clear an indication of the truth as any words could be. She began, stumblingly, hoping that shock would pass for surprise, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean. What exactly are you asking me?’

It seemed inconceivable that Grace could have given Cressida any cause for suspicion, even inadvertently. She had spent eighteen years shielding her secret, and she had done it so effectively that it was a long time since Clio or Jake or Julius had so much as thought about the old bloodlines. Cressida was Anthony’s daughter.

‘You are your father’s daughter.’

Cressida’s face twisted. ‘Yes. But which father?’

Clio thought of Romy, lying asleep in the next room, with her fist held up to her round cheek. Romy was a child, who could be told stories of her father so that he would stay alive in her memory. But Cressida was not a child any longer; what story could Clio tell her?

She said, ‘I think you should ask Grace that, not me.’

‘I don’t want to ask
Grace
. I don’t talk to Grace about anything except my Season, and which dress I should wear, and what behaviour is suitable and what is not.’

There was a flatness in her refusal that convinced Clio that it was not Grace who had put the suspicion into her head. And although Cressida’s complaint used the same limited words that any privileged girl of her generation might have used about her mother, there was a different pain behind it. Clio had observed Grace and Cressida over the years, and she could guess at some of the distance that lay between them.

Not for Romy and me, she vowed again.

‘I want you to tell me,’ Cressida said.

There was the faint echo of music once more. Clio saw that the fire was burning low. She reached for the little brass scuttle and shook out some coal. She had never learned that she was supposed to ring for the maid.

‘Anthony or Pilgrim? Please, Clio. I can see that you know. Once I’m certain we needn’t ever talk about it again. It’s not being sure, don’t you see that?’ Cressida was urgent now. Her tears had dried up.

Clio looked at her. Her hand still rested on the polished handle of the coal scuttle. She would either have to lie, or tell the truth.

‘Pilgrim,’ she said.

Cressida breathed in, a sharp snatch of air, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time. But then she leant back, folding her hands in her lap to cover the tear-marks on her dress. She nodded, quite calmly, as if she was relieved.

‘Yes. He told me so.’

I would like to kill him
, Clio thought.

‘What else did he tell you?’

Cressida made a small movement, to indicate that there was nothing else, or nothing that could be as important as the single fact.

‘Did he tell you how young your mother was, and how innocent? Did he tell you exactly what he did, and how it happened?’

‘No. I didn’t ask him. I told him I didn’t believe him. But at the same time, you know, I did believe it. It seemed to be an explanation of something I had always felt, and never examined in myself because I didn’t know what to look for. It was before, before Alice died, that he told me. When you were all in Berlin. Since then I’ve put the truth and the illusion to myself over and over again. Like the pros and cons, in a trial?

‘But I always knew it would be you that I would have to ask in the end. Because you and my mother …’

Cressida was not notably articulate. Instead of trying to make the words she held up her two hands to Clio and then pressed the palms together so that they matched. And then she shrugged.

‘I don’t know why tonight. Because of the champagne, I suppose.’

Clio thought, Not just because of the champagne. Perhaps because even in your imprecise way you sense that tonight is an ending.

She was suddenly angry.

‘I will tell you what happened. Surely you want to know that too? Pilgrim seduced your mother when she was hardly more than a girl. The age that you are now. You may think that you know everything, Cressida. Probably you don’t really know very much, but however much it is, it’s far more than Grace and I knew. We were as innocent as Romy, although we believed that we were women of the world.

‘When Grace found that she was going to have a baby she knew there was no use in turning to Pilgrim for help. What she did do was to ask me, and Jake and Julius, and we couldn’t do anything either. So she married your father.’

‘Anthony.’

‘She married Anthony, who loved her. And then much later she fell in love with him, as you must know. They were noticeably happy together. I envied them.’

‘He never knew?’

‘No, nor never even suspected. I’m sure of that. Grace kept her secret.’

Cressida’s mouth pulled downwards, showing her distaste.

‘Don’t judge her,’ Clio said sharply.

And then she wondered, Why am I defending Grace? My opposite and my reflection, the left hand matching the right …

‘I will tell you something else, Cressida. Pilgrim seduced me, too.’

Cressida laughed, at first in disbelief and then with the first signs of amusement. ‘Yes, I can believe that. He would have liked it, wouldn’t he? But you were luckier?’

‘It was later. I was older, although not much more sensible. Grace was the one he preferred, the one he really wanted.’

Clio’s anger had evaporated. She sat down beside Cressida again and put her arm around her. ‘You will be cleverer, won’t you, when your turn comes?’ As it soon would. Cressida’s contemporaries were downstairs, dancing while they might, the young men with their pink faces.

There was another surprise to come.

Cressida faced her abruptly. ‘Can I come to Paradise Square, to live with you and Romy? I don’t want to stay at Vincent Street any longer.’

‘Yes, you do.’ Clio tried to be as gentle as she could. ‘Grace is your mother, and she loves you.’

She had seen Grace looking at Cressida as if she were hungry, and had no idea how to assuage the hunger. And Cressida had turned stiffly away. How slowly the pieces fit into place, Clio reflected, and how long it takes us to understand even the simplest things.

She began to say that Cressida must stay with Grace, and that she must not allow the fact of an accident of birth to alter all her life. But Cressida cut her short.

‘Yes. I see that. Thank you for telling me the truth.’

Then very quietly, so that Clio had to lean forward to hear the words, she added, ‘It was Anthony I always loved best.’

‘I know. He loved you very much, too. I remember his face when he looked at you. Grace told me once that when they came in at night, however late it was, he would run up to the nursery to look at you asleep.’

‘I didn’t know that. Thank you.’

Cressida examined her face. Clio waited, but there were no more questions. The fire had kindled again and flames licked at the iron throat of the grate. Cressida jumped up and pirouetted, with a pretence at vivacity. Her skirt swirled around her ankles. The tear-spots had vanished.

‘Oh, goodness. Look at the time. Almost two.’

At two o’clock, it had been arranged, the Earl and Countess would leave the ball. Their guests would stay on until it was daylight again.

‘We had better go and wave them off.’

‘I might catch the bouquet,’ Cressida pouted.

There was a crush of people at the foot of the great staircase. Cressida and Clio slipped in amongst them. Clio saw Tabby and waved at her in surprise. If Tabby was up, it must be the best party ever given.

Hugo and Lucy appeared at the top of the stairs. There was a huge cheer as they came slowly down the wide curve, arm in arm. When she reached the bottom step, Lucy lifted one arm and tossed her bouquet. It was her sister Venetia who caught it.

The couple crossed the marble floor between the throngs of their guests, under a shower of dried rosepetals. Clio found that there were tears in her eyes. She blinked, and then saw Blanche and Eleanor, with their arms around one another’s waists, the same expression of happy satisfaction on their faces.

Two footmen were standing holding open the tall doors. Hugo and Lucy turned back to wave, and then went slowly out and down the steps with their families and friends surging after them. Hugo’s chauffeur was waiting beside a long black car. Lucy’s dress seemed almost to fill the back of the car with white froth, but Hugo climbed in and swung his useless leg after him.