Jerusalem the Golden (16 page)

The relationships between the brothers and the sisters were also a
revelation to her. The feelings between them were peculiarly intense; their concern for each other was unfailing, and they spoke of each other with absorbed and passionate affection. Only the unfortunate eldest, Amelia, was excluded from the close circle of mutual admiration, and she had cut herself off, had deserted them, had gone away with a dreadful man to live in the country. They mourned over her, and recalled together the happy past before her severance, and discussed her plight with endless solicitude, but to no avail; though constantly invited, she never came. And Mrs Denham, when she spoke of Amelia, which she often did, as though in nervous, restless propitiation, would seem overcast by some real shadow, a shadow that for Clara merely heightened the radiant intimacy of those that remained. She had never in her life seen or heard of such a mother, a mother capable of such pleasant, witty and overt concern, nor had she ever seen an image of fraternal love. She had read of it, in the classics, as she had read of human sacrifices and necrophilia and incest, but she had not thought to see it with her own eyes.

She never met Amelia, but she met all the others. She met them gradually, by means of a photograph album. Had she not been past astonishment, she would have been astonished when Mrs Denham, after supper on the first whole evening that she spent with them (an evening specially arranged, or so they managed to make it seem, to celebrate the end of her examinations) had produced this photograph album, for she had always been taught that such objects were marks of vulgarity, manifestations of the worst possible taste, as fatally revealing as a pet Alsatian dog on the windowsill or ferrets in the back yard. Her own mother had had much to say on the subject of pricey albums entitled ‘My First Baby’ or ‘Our Wedding Day’ purchased by other residents in Hartley Road. But the Denhams seemed gaily unaware of the dreadful risk that they were running, and Clara, looking with Clelia and her mother at the strange pages of strange photographs, could see that they had little to lose. The pictures were a weird mélange; some of them were classical family groups, of weddings and christenings and birthdays; some of them were amateur holiday snapshots; some were highly glossy, highly expensive posed pieces, of Mrs Denham at her typewriter, Mr Denham by a
garden urn, Mrs Denham with a baby on her knee; and some were photos cut out of newspapers and magazines. Clara stared at them, enthralled. She did not know which amazed her more, the pictures of Mrs Denham holding some lace-trailing infant with all the gravity of tradition behind her, or the pictures of small children disporting themselves in classy sunhats on the beaches of southern Europe. It was by means of these photographs that she finally managed to sort the family out: the two eldest, Amelia and Magnus, closely resembled their father, being tall and heavily built, whereas the three younger ones, Gabriel, Clelia and Annunciata, were all amazingly alike. The same face stared out of all their photographs, the same distinctive face. The similarity startled her, for she had thought that Clelia must be unique. There was one photograph in particular that caught the whole family, in sudden clarity: it had been cut out of a glossy magazine, together with its caption, and the caption said:

Candida Gray, seen here with all the proof of her creativity over the last twelve years, including her newest production,
A Fall from Grace
, published by Walter Bruce and Co. Ltd, and her newest baby, Annunciata. The three youngest children are wearing clothes by Hesther Laprade, whose new shop,
L’enfant gâté
, opens this week.

And the picture showed Candida, sitting in the very armchair which she was at that moment, sixteen years later, occupying, with a pile of her own books on a small table by her side, a baby on her knee, and four children ranged neatly around her. When Clara exclaimed upon it, and upon the exquisite scowls adorning the faces of the older children, Mrs Denham started to apologize for it, saying that she had never meant to let the children be put in magazines, and that really she did find it a little, yes, just a little embarrassing, to see what she’d allowed to happen, but that she’d only really done it for Hesther’s sake, and that it had all been wasted effort anyway, for Hesther was no business woman, and had indeed gone bankrupt, and that all that anyone had profited from it had been her own acquiring of a free set of clothes for Gabriel, Annunciata and Clelia.

‘And lovely clothes they were, too,’ she said, finally, ‘and they wore well too, and I kept them because they were so nice, and Gabriel tells me that their baby looks lovely in Annunciata’s dress, though I haven’t had a chance to see her in it yet. Pale green, it was, with honeysuckle on, a kind of lawn, I think, rather a bore to iron if I remember rightly, but pretty, quite pretty enough to make it worth it; and if there is anything Phillipa will spend time on, I must admit that it’s on clothes.’

The other picture that Clara particularly liked was a posed portrait of Candida with Clelia as a two-year-old, and Gabriel as a small boy by her side. It had been taken on Clelia’s second birthday, and it had been taken by one of the very few photographers of whom Clara had ever heard, and who emerged as a friend of the family, as did, peripherally, so many other familiar names, whose faded faces, or truncated limbs, or unintentional back views adorned a large quantity of the holiday snapshots.

‘I
think
that must be Eliot,’ said Candida, at one point, peering hard at an infinitely receding figure in the pale brown mists at the back of one document from Paris in the thirties: and Scott Fitzgerald, front view, and arm in arm with Candida, was more confidently acclaimed. The posed portrait reminded Clara of paintings that she had seen, with little enthusiasm, in art galleries and ancient monuments, and just as the Denhams’ drawing room had reconciled her to so many other dead and empty drawing rooms, so the photograph seemed to breathe life into those tediously scrutinized oil paintings of long-aged and dead small children. Candida sat there, her back to the long window, and her hair longer than it now was, and piled upon her head: small Clelia, grave and round, in a short dark crochet-collared dress, sat solemnly upon her knee, and her arm and her mother’s arm lay side by side, their gentle flesh most softly parallel, in a lovely heap of human shape. Candida’s other arm encircled Gabriel who stood by her side frowning, and holding in one hand a wooden ship. Clara seeing it, understood entirely, as she had never understood before, why one should wish to perpetuate such things, and why generation after generation had endeavoured to fix such moments into an eternity. For love, surely, was at the
source of such conventional efforts; there had been love and at every stage.

She liked the look of Gabriel. She looked, anxiously, through the more recent pages of the book, in search of his adult image, but he was rather sparsely represented; there were a couple of snapshots of him at Cambridge, looking indistinctly handsome sitting on a wall in front of King’s, but the only revealing picture was one which had been taken at the christening of Magnus’s first child. Gabriel was, in fact, holding the baby: a baby elaborately draped and swathed in the ancient lace robe of the Denhams’ own childhood christenings. Candida had herself been christened in it, she claimed, and it had been embroidered by her own grandmother. Gabriel was not looking at the camera, but at the child, and he was smiling. He looked very promising. As far as one could tell from a photograph, he looked quite alarmingly wonderful. She wondered if it were possible for him to look as wonderful as the camera promised that he might.

There were no pictures of Gabriel’s own wedding. Mrs Denham said that as they were only five years old, she had not yet got around to sticking them in, and that they lay somewhere at the bottom of a drawer.

When the album had been put away, Clara, thinking over the world that it had revealed to her, thought that perhaps it dismayed her a little, although it at the same time so strongly attracted her. It was a small rich world, a world of endless celebration and fame, and a world that was gone and past sharing. Advantages blossomed on its pages, and it seemed at moments as though love (and why not?) might be a forced plant, an unnatural flower that could not grow in thinner soil.

The Denhams led her, quite literally, into areas that she had never visited before. She knew Highgate and Hampstead from earlier days and visits to other friends, but she had never set foot in Bond Street, where Clelia’s gallery was, and where, from time to time, she visited her. She had had no cause to go there, having no money to spend. And Bond Street seemed in some way to be but a logical extension of the Highgate house, for there in the windows of the shops, in the embroidered evening bags and jewelled trinkets and silken shirts,
she found faint, degraded echoes of the charm of the Denhams themselves, and she wondered uneasily if expense were not after all the key to so much charm. Bond Street tired her, as the Denham’s conversation tired her; the streets might have been paved with gold, but they made hard walking, and the sight of the price tags made her feel faint.

Clelia’s gallery exhausted her too, though in a different way. It rigorously eschewed the decorative; it was small, select, and very white, and full of a chilly pale intimacy. It specialized in bleak, expensive, fashionable, non-representational paintings: Clelia said that they were all good paintings, and Clara’s eyes and imagination ached from the effort of trying to locate their virtues. It was there that she first met Magnus, the eldest brother, who had dropped in for no other reason than to have a chat with his sister; he was, or so Clara had been told, a political economist, but he appeared nevertheless to know a considerable amount about paintings, and discussed the current exhibition with some finesse, finding causes for preference and dislike where she herself could see only indistinct austerity. She did not make much of Magnus; he was too like his father, he offered little, and spoke so quietly and modestly that it was hard to catch what he was saying. When he had gone, Clelia turned to her eagerly and asked her, as was her manner, her views, and Clara hardly knew what to reply. In the end,

‘I didn’t make much of him,’ she honestly said, and Clelia laughed, and said that he was an acquired taste, and that she should wait until she met Gabriel.

Clara spent much time in Clelia’s gallery, over the last weeks of her final term. Clelia seemed to like to have her there, as she had no work to do; there were few visitors, and few of those who came wanted to buy, and when they did want to buy Clelia had to send for Martin. So all the time that Clara was not there, Clelia spent in reading novels under the desk. Clara liked to go, because she liked Clelia, and because she found the Bond Street world compelling, irresistible, uniting as it did so much that she desired and mistrusted: they had lunch together, in different places each day, and listened to the conversations of others when they ran out of breath themselves, and Clelia always, deprecatingly, tactfully, disarmingly paid.

And over their mushrooms, risottos and escalopes and chips they vowed, after a manner, an eternal friendship, each being old enough to recognize the rare quality of their communications. When Clara left London for the summer, and returned to Northam, they wrote to each other, long, intimate, witty letters, the kind of letters that Clara fancied she had for years been casting before if not swine at least less than perfect readers; in August Clelia went to Greece for three weeks, but even from Greece she sent postcards. And when, towards the end of September, they both returned to London, Clelia from Athens, and Clara from Northam, each thought of their reunion with satisfaction, and Clara had to acknowledge to herself, and, indeed, in correspondence, deviously, to Clelia, that the thought of Clelia roused more enthusiasm in her than the thought of rejoining any of the other inhabitants of her emotional domain.

It was on her return to London that she met, for the first time, Gabriel. The very evening of her arrival Clelia rang, and after the excited exchange of news asked her to come round.

‘Come at once, come instantly,’ said Clelia, ‘I can’t wait to see you, and if you can come this evening you can see Annunciata. Do come this evening because she’s off to Oxford tomorrow.’

Clelia managed to imply that the seeing of Annunciata was the greatest treat she could offer, and Clara wondered what it must be like to have relatives that one could thus serve up, with pride, as ornamental additions to one’s own confident self.

‘I don’t know if I ought to come,’ said Clara. ‘I’m supposed to be unpacking my trunk.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Clelia. ‘Do come, please come, you must come.’

‘All right,’ said Clara, ‘I’ll come at once.’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Clelia, ‘I’ll send Gabriel round for you in his car.’

‘Oh goodness no,’ said Clara, shocked by such magnanimity on another’s behalf, ‘oh no, I’ll come on the bus, it won’t take me long.’

‘No, no,’ said Clelia, ‘I’ll send Gabriel, just a moment, I’ll go and ask him,’ and she went off before Clara could protest any further. And when the receiver was picked up, it was Gabriel that spoke.

‘Hello,’ he said, in a voice that much resembled his sister’s. ‘Hello, Clara. Do let me come and fetch you, because look, it’s raining outside. Let me fetch you. Where are you staying?’

And Clara, looking out of the window at the rain, and hearing his voice, and the risky, familiar use of her name by those unseen lips, and feeling the glass of solitude crack instantly at the faint warm enticements of sociability, said yes, all right, and gave him the address of her lodgings. She had found herself a room off the Archway, and when he heard the name of the street, he said,

‘But that’s no distance at all.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Clara, who had chosen the room for precisely such a reason.

‘I’ll be round in five minutes,’ said Gabriel.

And he was. Clara spent the five minutes by changing out of one jersey into another more or less identical one; all her clothes were the same. And during the five minutes she also considered that she would probably fall in love with Gabriel, because a summer in Northam always reduced her to a state where she was ready to fall in love with a taxi driver or the man in the restaurant car on the London train. She viewed the prospect of falling in love with Gabriel with a fatalistic pleasure; she thought that she would enjoy it. The fact that he was already married was to her merely an added enticement, for she had always fancied the idea of a complicated, illicit and disastrous love. She had up to this point spent much time gratuitously complicating various perfectly straightforward affairs with her own contemporaries, in the hope of discovering the true thick brew of real passion, but her efforts had not had much success; she had lacked the ingredients. And after her acquisition of Clelia, earlier that year, she had detached herself entirely from her one thin, current attempt at intrigue with one of her professors: an intrigue which she had fostered more for its lack of orthodoxy than for any progress that it might be expected to make.