All My Sins Remembered (94 page)

She ran across the room and tore the music away, then slammed down the piano lid so that Grace had to snatch her hand back. The keys rattled their faint protest.

The two of them confronted each other. In that second their white faces were identical, but there was no one to see them and remark on it. Clio’s fist had whirled up and it seemed for a moment that she would strike out. They might have fought then, like children, biting and scratching and rolling over and over on the stone floor.

But Grace turned sharply away. The house and its ghost were suddenly unbearably oppressive. She would go out for an hour and walk Julius’s last territory with his dog for company. And afterwards she would drive away to Stretton. She put on her coat and whistled to the dog, then opened the door that led on to the marshes. The wind whirled into the room again and blew the sheets of music off the piano. Rainspots darkened the flags.

Gelert cringed on the threshold, unwilling to venture out, but Grace saw the length of string that the farmer had brought. She tied it to his collar, and pulled him out with her.

Clio followed across the room and slid the wooden bolt behind them. She went upstairs, with her feet dragging heavily on the angled treads. She looked down from the window that faced the sea and saw Grace marching away. The collie balked and tugged on the string, shrinking from the weather, but Grace held her head up, turning her face into the driving rain.

Clio sat down on the bed. Afterwards, she could not remember how long it was before she looked out of the window again. When she did raise her head, it was to stare at the sea-wall in the distance.

The waves began to lap over the defence. It was high water again. Slowly, almost lazily, the ripples spilt over and were swallowed by the marsh. The universe seemed full of water. There was a long, shivering moment of silence when nothing moved in the sodden world except the idle ripples.

Then the wall split, like the skin of a rotten fruit, and the sea came bursting through it.

At once a great cliff of water, a wave topped with a crest of dirty foam as high as a church, raced over the marshland towards the cottage. Clio watched it, spellbound with fear. In the same instant she saw Grace running ahead of the thundering water, running with her hands outstretched and Julius’s dog like a wolf in front of her.

Clio was frozen. The downstairs door was bolted from within, she had shot the bolt. She would have to open it to let Grace in ahead of the predatory sea, but she only stood at the window, watching her cousin running. The wave was a black wall now, but it moved so fast. Clio did not move.

At last, after an infinity of time chopped into teeming and hurling splinters of memory and longing, Clio whirled away from the window. She threw herself down the dog-leg of the stairs, jarring her bones into flight across the lower room. Her fingers were stretching to the bolt when she heard the terrible drumming of Grace’s fists on the other side.

At once there came an overpowering roar as the flood water surged around the house. The sturdy front door held but a second later the back door was smashed down and the water swirled in. Clio flung herself at the stairs again, clawing herself upwards as the torrent swept beneath her.

She found herself standing at the top of the stairwell, gazing down at the inky swell a few feet below her, her breath sobbing in her throat.

Her hands convulsively mimed the gesture of unbolting the door and throwing it open to let Grace in to safety.

Outside the greedy water swept on, eating the flat land past the farm and up to the road that skirted on the marshes.

When the night came only the upper half of Julius’s cottage was visible, sticking up out of the shifting expanse of the redrawn sea.

The night brought a blackness more hideous than anything Clio had ever known. She crouched in the dark like an animal, feeling it touching her skin and pressing like pennies on her eyelids. She forced her eyes wide open. The noise of the wind and water echoed in her head, and swelled louder, and in front of her staring eyes the same images played over and over. There was the black wall of water, and Grace running with the dog, and then a confusion of smashing waves and pounding fists, and a body swept over and over, and her own blind face, under the skin of the sea.

Ever since the day of the
Mabel
, Grace had been afraid of the sea and of death by drowning.

At last, after what seemed like an infinity of time but was only in the grey dawn, the rescue boats came. They brought men in waders, carrying torches and ropes. The men came up the stairs and found Clio huddled against the inner wall of the bedroom. They lifted her up, gently and kindly, reassuring her in soft Welsh voices. ‘There now,
geneth bach
, you are safe now. It’s all over, you are safe now.’

Her white face and staring eyes frightened them, and they saw the little movements that her hands made, to and fro, opening and shutting something that was invisible to them. But she was cold, chilled to her bones, and suffering from shock. She was not hurt, and so she would recover.

Grace’s body was recovered five days later, from the rocks of the Anglesey coast. Gelert was lost to the sea.

Twenty-four

Clio was ill for a long time.

She was taken first to hospital in Wales, and when it was discovered there that she could not eat, or sleep without the aid of medication, she was moved to a special hospital in Oxford where it was thought that the proximity of her parents and daughter might help her eventual recovery. Her doctors and Jake agreed that her collapse was the result of shock, and the stress of another bereavement following so soon after the loss of Julius.

Nathaniel and Eleanor came to see her, always bringing Romy with them. They assured her over and over again that the little girl was safe, and happy with them in the Woodstock Road, because Clio seemed to need their assurances. She would sit silently holding Romy’s hand, watching them all with fear and anxiety in her eyes. After their visits, sitting in the drawing room overlooking the garden with Romy in bed asleep, the elder Hirshes would remind each other that Clio and Grace had been close all their lives. They were born on the same day, and were as much a part of one another as blood twins. It was no wonder that Clio was ill, they said. After everything she had suffered.

The old people tried to concentrate their affection and their hopes on Romy. The three deaths in such close succession had drawn a darkness and fearfulness around them, but they struggled to hide it from Clio. In time they discovered that Jake was right; they were able to submerge some of their own sadness as they watched Romy playing in the now overgrown garden.

No one blamed Clio for her breakdown; all through the weeks of her illness she felt the love and concern of her family gently pressing against the boundaries of her confusion. She was too ill to go to Grace’s quiet funeral at Stretton, nor was she able to attend the grand memorial service at Westminster, at which Grace’s friends, and her political opponents as well as her allies, paid tribute to her determined spirit.

Afterwards, Clio could not remember very much about this time. She was thankful for that. The memories that she did have were of dreams, she knew with hindsight that they must have been dreams, but while she suffered them they were infinitely more real than the hospital ward. She dreamt of water, and faces, and supplicating hands. These horrors came time after time, the same water engulfing her until she feared it so much that she could not turn on a tap to wash her hands, or drink from the beaker on her night table. The hands reached out at her from every shadow and beyond every corner. She folded her own hands into her armpits rather than watch herself fumbling for a bolt that was never drawn back. The faces watched her wherever she went. They were always familiar faces made unfamiliar by their expressions; the features were her own and yet not her own.

There were also visions of punishment. Jailers converged on her and came so close that she cowered away from them before they dissolved and became regiments of teachers and battalions of marching soldiers. She waited in her dreams, wishing for it, whatever it might prove to be, but the threatened punishment was never visited on her.

Then, quite suddenly, she began to recover.

All the time she was ill Clio knew in some recess of her mind that her illness was an occupation that saved her from having to do anything else.

Almost overnight it came to her that doing something was preferable to occupying the limbo of dreams.

From that day onwards, the potency of the visions began to diminish. She began to sleep without needing to swallow pills, and woke up feeling refreshed. The ward she had lived in for weeks became fixed, and no longer dissolved in and out of focus. Its small area reassured her, and then rapidly became boring and confining. Clio began to take walks in the hospital grounds. She found that spring had turned into a hot summer. Horse chestnut trees spread their shade over mown lawns.

One day Nathaniel brought Romy to see her. Clio sat her daughter on her lap and brushed the mass of fair curls back from the child’s round face.

‘Do you know, Romy, we must do something about your hair?’

She heard herself saying it, and saw Nathaniel looking at her in surprised happiness. Clio twisted a thick rope of hair in her fingers, feeling the springy warmth of it.

‘We could plait it, or braid it like this, couldn’t we? It would make you look so pretty.’

Grete had worn her hair in a braid around her head, the same colour hair. The last letter from Waltersroda had arrived more than a year ago, and after that there had been silence, and no reply to any of Clio’s own letters. Clio could only guess what had happened to Grete and Leopold. Who would wait for Rafael, she thought, if she herself did not?

Clio turned with sudden urgency to her father. She said, ‘I want to come home. When can I come home?’

Nathaniel’s beard was almost completely white, like his hair. He had taken off his old panama hat and it rested beside his chair with his walking stick. He reached out and took Clio’s hand, and held it in his own.

‘When you are ready,’ he told her. ‘When you feel that you want to.’

In another ten days, her doctors agreed that she could be discharged. Clio went home to the Woodstock Road at the beginning of July 1939.

She stayed with Eleanor and Nathaniel for a week. She reabsorbed the sounds and the scents of the old house, moving quietly through the rooms, looking at the shabby furniture and the worn covers. She sat down in front of the open doors that led out on to the balcony, amidst the scent of roses and jasmine, and gazed up at
The Janus Face
.

The staring faces had been part of her hospital dreams, and the separate bodies that grew from the same bud of flesh had been sucked again and again into the churning water.

Now that those horrors had diminished, in the calm of her parents’ house with the summer glow of Eleanor’s garden spread beneath her, Clio understood what she must learn to endure.

She would have to live for ever with her memory of the flood, and her certainty of what she had done on that day.

She had caused Grace’s death.

Through her hesitation, the moment of deliberate inaction that was the one sterile fruit springing from all her years of jealousy and rivalry, she had killed Grace. She could have reached the door in time, and unbolted it to give her cousin shelter from the wall of water. But by her fatal hesitation she had caused her to drown. That was all, and everything.

Her guilt was her only twin now, and this black twin would never leave her. It would be her companion for ever.

The sun in the west struck through the windows and illuminated the portrait. Clio stared up at the webs of colour that Pilgrim had woven into their streaming hair, and at the ramparts of solid flesh that forever strained to break apart from each other. It was a good picture, she thought. It revealed the truth, and the truth was not pretty.

Pilgrim had always said that it was his masterpiece.

Romy came to look for her. She held a pack of Happy Families cards. ‘Mummy, will you play?’

‘Of course I will. But we need another person.’

‘Cressida likes this game.’

‘I know she does, but Cressy isn’t here.’

‘Grandpappy, then.’

‘Let’s go and find him, shall we?’

They settled down together to Mr Bun the Baker and his friends. Nathaniel won, and he took just as much pleasure in his triumph as Romy would have done if it had been hers. Watching them, Clio thought how close together youth and old age were. It was she who was isolated, in her middle years.

At six o’clock Nathaniel turned on the radio for the news. They listened to the description of German arms and soldiers pouring into the Baltic port of Danzig.

‘We shall be at war soon,’ Nathaniel said. ‘There’s no hope now.’

Romy spread out the cards on the green baize table-top and then gathered them together in her small hands.

‘I think we should move back to Paradise Square,’ Clio told him. ‘Romy and I shouldn’t trespass on Mama and you for ever.’

‘You can if you wish.’

She smiled at him. ‘I know that. But I’d like to go back to my own house before … anything else happens.’ She would not say
before the war comes
, although they both knew that it could not be very many days off.

The little house had been kept well aired. Tabby came in sometimes to look after it, in her novice’s dress with the ivory crucifix lying snug against a starched bib. Tabby was calm and sure now. She had found her own place, and her family could only try to accept what they could not hope to understand.

Clio and Romy moved back home again at the beginning of August. Clio found that someone had placed Julius’s Mozart in a niche at the angle of the stairs. She supposed that it was Nathaniel.

The Morris Eight had been recovered when the floodwaters receded, but all of Julius’s books and papers and music had been destroyed. The marble bust alone had survived, and Clio was pleased to find it in her house. She was satisfied to be home again. She believed that she could go on living here, because she must, with her black twin. It would be a quiet and uneventful life, lived for Romy’s sake.