All My Sins Remembered (97 page)

He ran like a hare, and found himself in the shelter of the trees. There was no outcry, and no crack of gunfire.

After that he had walked by night, and hidden himself by day, and he had been helped by a farmer’s wife who fed him and gave him a workman’s clothes. The farmer’s wife had a neighbour who owned a wagon, and at last Rafael had made his way to the Swiss border. In Switzerland there was a Jewish organization that had been formed to help refugees. When he reached them they took him in, and they gave him the passport and papers of a Polish Jew, an engineer who had been shot by the Nazis. They had also given him enough money to reach England.

The last link in the chain was the telephone call from Zürich to Nathaniel in Oxford. Nathaniel had agreed to claim the Polish Jew as a relative, and to offer him a home and a sanctuary in England.

And so almost in the last hours of peace, Rafael reached Dover. He travelled by train to London, and from London to Oxford across the little, domestic, gold and green landscape of England.

He was luckier than Grete and Leopold Wolf, who did not escape. The men had come for them, to the little house against the wall of the forest, and they had been taken away.

Rafael bent forward in his seat, wrapping his thin arms around himself. A soldier in a fore-and-aft cap was sitting opposite, watching him.

‘You all right, cock?’ the soldier asked.

Rafael took a scrap of paper out of the pocket of his shirt and held it out to the man. ‘Do you know this place, please?’

The soldier frowned a little at the sound of his accent. Then he shrugged. ‘Paradise Square? It’s an easy walk from the station. Left over the road, and up to a big crossroads.’

Rafael listened to the man’s instructions, plodding through this last stage of the long journey in his head. He felt as if he had been travelling for half a lifetime.

‘You got that, mate?’

‘Yes. Thank you so much.’

There was a jolt and a hiss of steam, and the train began to edge forward again. Engine sheds and signal boxes slid backwards past Rafael’s staring eyes, and then he saw the chocolate and yellow wooden fretwork of the platform canopy.

Clio watched the black moon of the engine face slowly approaching in its nimbus of smoke. She had met every possible train since Nathaniel had brought her the news, and with each disappointment when Rafael did not appear she remembered how she had waited in vain for him on the terrible morning in Paris. Anxiety made her shiver even in the thundery heat.

With a final jolt the train stopped. There was a fusillade of shots as the doors slammed open along the length of the platform and passengers flooded out. The station was crowded with a swarm of men in uniform with kitbags and women in bright dresses, and because his eyes and ears were still attuned to the grey monotony of the work camp Rafael felt confused and afraid of the noise and colour. He lifted the small bag that the Jewish group in Switzerland had given to him and climbed down, the last to leave the compartment.

From where she stood at the end of the platform, shading her eyes against the sun, Clio saw a tall man with hair as grey as ash and a face like a skull papered with translucent skin. He had changed almost beyond recognition, but she did not mistake him for an instant.

Rafael hesitated while the crowd ebbed around him, and then he looked towards her. She was thinner, and there were lines at the sides of her mouth, but her face was still soft and it burnt with love.

He put down his bag and held open his arms, and she ran to him.

London, 1990

Clio sat in her house in Little Venice, beneath
The Janus Face
by Quintus Prynne. The portrait was not much admired nowadays although its strident modernism had once been acclaimed, and the artist himself was all but forgotten. He had been an official war artist, and he had been killed by a stray bomb in 1944.

Clio remembered him, and many other things besides. The memories marched past her as she sat in her high-backed chair. Sometimes she could see the faces clearly and at other times they were blurred, receding away from her into the grey distance. Sometimes she couldn’t even see Rafael’s face. Rafael had been her husband for thirty-five happy years, but he had been dead for fifteen and she was tired now, and bored by her own infirmity and the solitude of old age.

Was it today that the girl was coming, with her machine and her questions? What was it the nurse had said?

And then, as if she had conjured them out of the sea of memories, the nurse appeared, and the girl with her. The girl had long hair, and she was wearing it loose over her shoulders today. Clio eyed it with disapproval. She did not consider it a suitable coiffure for a girl who was not really a girl at all, but a woman of almost forty.

The woman sat down opposite her, and the nurse brought them tea on a tray. Clio didn’t want any tea, but she took the cup anyway.

‘You are not too tired, are you?’ Elizabeth asked. The nurse had warned her that her patient was confused and anxious today.

‘I am not tired at all,’ Clio lied.

The girl was Cressida Brock’s daughter, of course. And so she was also Pilgrim’s granddaughter, sitting opposite his masterpiece, which she plainly did not care for at all. The realization made Clio want to laugh.

Clio wondered if they had ever talked about Pilgrim, or if she had only imagined it. Elizabeth’s questions confused her. She could remember the exact configuration of the patterned linoleum in the old schoolroom in the Woodstock Road, but she could not remember if Cressida’s daughter had been here with her questions yesterday, or if it had been last week, or a month ago.

The days played tricks on her now.

Clio could not remember what she had already told the girl and what was still mute memory. She was afraid that she was repeating herself, the stories that she knew to be innocent, in an attempt to suppress what must not be told.

The secrets grew harder to keep with the passage of time.

The dark twin was always with her, the sin she had committed. A sudden longing to confess it swept up inside her, breaking through the careful silence of the decades that seemed no longer as imperative as the truth.

Clio thought that the girl with her long, loose hair looked like Ophelia in a pre-Raphaelite painting. The thoughts crossed and tangled in her mind.

She said loudly, ‘Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered.’

That was exactly right. Her sin must be remembered, and this long-haired nymph with her recording machine had been sent to her for the purpose of hearing her confession.

‘What was that?’ Elizabeth asked.

The stupid girl probably didn’t know her Shakespeare at all. What had the line been? Clio realized that she had forgotten it already, and it was so very important.

‘What was I saying?’ She shook her head in bewilderment.

‘Don’t worry. It will come back. There’s plenty of time.’

Elizabeth felt less calm than she sounded. The truth was that she did not have plenty of time. She must finish the book soon.

She knew objectively that she shouldn’t spend any more time with Clio. She had already told her everything she remembered about her cousin from more than fifty years ago.

And yet, something still drew her back to Little Venice, to sit under the terrible portrait. Clio had been closer to Grace than anyone, and she had been deeply shocked by her death. There was probably nothing there, but Elizabeth was still waiting for some extra insight into Grace’s life. Some story, perhaps, that she had not heard before.

She repeated. ‘There’s plenty of time.’ And she was thinking, Just give me something, Clio. Just one little extra spark will help me to get the bloody book finished, and I’ll put you in it too.

Clio said, more to herself than to Cressida’s daughter, ‘I don’t think so.’

The child was mistaken. There was not much time.

She stirred in her chair. ‘I want to talk about the flood. Are you listening to me?’

As calmly as she could, Elizabeth told her, ‘I know all about the flood, Aunt Clio. Grace’s drowning is very well documented. There are contemporary news reports, diaries, letters. They all describe what happened, and I have read everything there is. It must have been dreadful.’

‘
I
didn’t write any diary,’ Clio said.

‘No.’

‘And I am the only person who knows what really happened.’

‘What did happen, Aunt Clio?’

Clio took a great breath. She tried to look round, over her own shoulder, to see the portrait for the last time. But the back of her chair was too high, and she found that she was too weak to crane sideways.

‘I killed Grace.’

Elizabeth’s eyes flicked to the door, in search of the day nurse. Clio was wandering again. She was also prone to making wild claims, Elizabeth had learnt that. It was as if she was afraid that her own story was not quite interesting enough; perhaps she had sensed all along that no one would really want to write or read her biography.

Elizabeth reddened guiltily, and leant forward to flick the stop button. Gently she said, ‘But Grace was caught in a flood, when the sea-wall gave way. She was swept away, no one could have saved her.’

Clio only repeated, ‘I killed her. I wouldn’t open the door to her. I wanted her to die.’

Her bright eyes had clouded. She stared straight ahead of her, into vacancy.

Elizabeth insisted, ‘No, Aunt Clio, she was swept away. She didn’t reach the door, did she? You felt guilty because you were saved and she was dead, isn’t that it? Grace was your friend, almost your twin. But you couldn’t have done anything to save her. You mustn’t believe it could have been any different. You never said anything about this before, did you? Your memory is playing tricks on you.’

Clio sank back in her chair, and closed her eyes.

‘I am tired now.’

All my sins, she thought.

Hamlet
, that was it. ‘All my sins remembered.’

She did remember. She had forgotten so much else, but never that. She had kept the secret of Grace and the flood, and that in itself had been a sin. There had been times when she had longed to tell the truth, to people she had loved and to others, strangers caught with her in the fleeting intimacy of ships and aeroplanes and hotels, but she had kept her secret. The necessity of keeping it had been a great burden, and the solitary shouldering of it had been part of her punishment.

Now the secret was told. Clio was weary and her body ached, but she felt better. Lighter, and stronger, like a girl again, as if a weight had floated away from her.

Elizabeth nodded and began to pack away her tape-recorder and her notebook. There was nothing else to learn; she must tell the story that she already knew. When she was ready to leave she hesitated, looking down at the shrunken face.

Clio opened her eyes. ‘What were we just talking about?’

Elizabeth smiled at her. ‘The old things,’ she answered.

She left Clio to doze in her chair, and went away to tell the nurse that she would let herself out.

When the front door had closed on the brief rattle of street noise the nurse came briskly through the quiet house. She bent over Clio in the chair, and then put her warm hand over her patient’s tiny clawed one.

‘Come along, Mrs Wolf, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s time for your rest.’

Clio nodded, smiling a little, ready to sleep.

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