All My Sins Remembered (11 page)

‘This can’t be easy for you, Hirsh,’ John said.

‘It isn’t easy for any of us. War does not have the reputation of ease.’

‘I meant for you in particular, with your, ah, antecedents.’

John Leominster knew quite well that Levi and Dora Hirsh had settled in Manchester from Bremen in the mid 1860s. Levi was a scientist, an industrial chemist, and he had prospered with England’s manufacturing prosperity. Levi and Dora had family spread across most of Europe, but after fifty years they would not have considered themselves anything but English.

‘My antecedents? I was born here, Leominster. I am as British as you are, my dear fellow.’

It was a favourite tease of Nathaniel’s. Leominster could trace his descent from Henry VII and his pale face darkened with annoyance now. ‘Not quite, but let us not argue about it.’

‘By all means not. More whisky, old chap?’

Hugo held up his glass too. ‘What do you think will happen, uncle?’

Nathaniel sighed, relinquishing the pleasure of baiting Leominster. ‘I think Britain will be at war with Germany in a matter of days. I feel great sadness for Germany and the German people, and for all of Europe. I feel the most sorrow for Jake, and you, even Julius. It will not be a short war, Hugo. You need not be afraid that you will miss it.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I shall join just as soon as I can, in any case.’

John put down his glass. ‘You may enlist when you are eighteen, Hugo, not before. I shall be proud to send you off then.’

Hugo asked eagerly, ‘And Jake? Jake is only seven months younger than I am.’

‘Jake must speak for himself, Hugo. But I understand that he feels as I do, that it should not be necessary for civilized peoples to kill and maim one another’s young men, and to leave a whole generation lying bleeding on some battlefield. I do not believe that Jake will want to go and slaughter his German cousins, and I am ashamed of the politicians and the leaders who will oblige him to make such a decision. I pray that he will have the courage to do what he believes is right, and I am sure he will find a way to be of service to our country.’

Nathaniel stood up, slowly, as if he was tired, and replaced the whisky decanter on the tray on his desk. The top of the desk was a drift of papers covered with his tiny handwriting, and he seemed to gaze longingly at it.

The Lords Leominster and Culmington exchanged glances. ‘And to show the damned Kaiser that Britain means business,’ Leominster muttered.

Nathaniel was still looking at his papers. There was the ordered world of scholarship, beckoning him. He put his hand up to rub his beard around his mouth where grey fronds were beginning to show amongst the wiry black. ‘If you wish,’ Nathaniel said absently.

‘Where is Jake?’ Hugo demanded.

‘I don’t know. I think Jake has problems of his own, just at present.’

Jake was standing at the upstairs landing window, looking down from one of the unpredictable angles of the house to the Woodstock Road below. A gas lamp on top of a tall iron post beyond the gate threw light on the evergreen shrubs beside the gate and tipped the points of the iron railings that bounded the front garden. A cyclist swooped silently past, and for an instant the street lamp laid a monster’s wavering shadow on the road before him.

Jake was not thinking about the war, or reflecting on duty and service to his country. He was wondering what his cousin Hugo did in circumstances like his own. Hugo was fond of hinting that he was a man of the world, but Jake couldn’t work out what that meant. He didn’t know either whether it was more Culmington nobly to resist temptation and think pure thoughts, or not to think at all and so avoid anxiety, as well as shame and guilt. Jake was not sure that there was any way of asking Hugo.

It was soothing to be alone in the dark, at least. He had been with Grace for most of the day, but he had never been alone with her for a second. Clio was always there, however mutely Jake willed her to take herself off. And Julius too; Julius had stayed close to them, seeing everything and saying nothing. For the first time, there was a break in the magic circle.

Jake sighed. There had been no chance to exchange a private word with Grace, let alone another kiss, a caress. They had contented themselves with looks. And he had seen that Grace looked happy, with rosier cheeks and brighter eyes than when she had arrived.

Perhaps that was enough, Jake thought. With the tender new concern he felt for her he wanted Grace to be happy as much as he wanted his own happiness. But his own happiness, or satisfaction at least, seemed to depend on the unthinkable. He remembered the boot room again, and the smell of galoshes and waterproofs and the taste of Grace. It was better that she should be happy, he told himself, and that he should suffer. It was the only solution, Culmington or otherwise.

Eleanor came up the stairs on her way to bed and saw Jake silhouetted at the window. He did not hear her approach and he jumped violently when she spoke.

‘Jakie, what is it? Is it the war?’

‘Yes,’ Jake lied. ‘The war.’ Even in his mother’s face he saw the shape of Grace’s features. Eleanor and Blanche and Clio. Sisters, family. And yet.

‘I was proud of what you said,’ Eleanor told him.

Jake found that he could barely remember what it was he had said. Some pompous diatribe about man’s higher instincts. Upon which, he thought, he was hardly in a position to pronounce.

‘But you are only sixteen. You are only a boy, Jake. Going to fight is for men, and so is taking the decision not to fight.’

Jake mumbled, ‘I know. I’m quite all right. I’m not worried about it.’

Eleanor put her hand up to his face. Jake stood a head taller than her; she wondered exactly when it was that this unfathomable man had emerged from the soft pupa of her child. He suffered her caress stiffly.

‘Go to bed now,’ Eleanor sighed.

Jake went obediently, and lay thinking about Grace.

By August 4, Britain was at war with Germany.

News came of crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, cheering and singing the national anthem. Hugo pored over the newspapers that carried pictures of young men flocking to recruiting offices. He ached with impatience to join them, and sighed over his misfortune in being just too young. The prospect of having to return to school for the next half while other men marched to glory filled him with despair.

It was odd to find that outwardly, visibly, nothing changed. The cousins discovered that Oxford looked exactly as it always did in the middle of the Long Vacation. The High was deserted except for plodding dons and dons’ wives shopping, and only the windows of the mens’ outfitters replaced their displays of academic robes and College ties with military tunics and officers’ caps. North Oxford drowsed beneath its canopies of trees, and there was the summer round of tennis parties and picnics and croquet games, no different from any other year.

Jake bore the sociable routine half impatiently and half gladly because it occupied the four of them and allowed him to be harmlessly near to Grace. Grace was very lively. Her vivacity made Clio look like her smaller shadow.

There were no more meetings in the boot room, because Grace did not look for the opportunities. Jake realized that he was shadowing her like a patient dog, hoping for a scrap of intimacy. She rewarded him with private smiles, and with the touch of her hand sometimes, when no one else was looking. He was tormented by the inadequacy of their contacts, and at the same time relieved that he did not have to control himself as he would if they were to find themselves alone.

The long days of August passed quickly, even for Hugo in the agony of his inactivity.

At the end of the month there was a picnic beside the river at Iffley, when the Hirshes and their cousins were joined by Dr Harris and his wife and small children. Nathaniel and Oswald Harris spread rugs and a white linen cloth in the shade of the trees, and Eleanor and Mary Harris unpacked wicker baskets and spooned raspberries into glass dishes. The small children ran and fell over in the grass, and Hugo and Jake and Julius swam in the river. Their shouts and splashings were swallowed prematurely by the still, heavy air. Nathaniel predicted that the day would end with a thunderstorm.

Clio and Grace, in white dresses and straw sunhats, walked arm in arm along the footpath. Grace unravelled coarse strands of goose-grass from the hedge and twisted them into sticky garlands for their straw hats.

‘You look like a girl in a painting,’ she told Clio. ‘Raspberry juice on your chin and leaves in your hair. It ought to be red wine, and vine leaves, and you could pose for Bacchus. He is the god of wine, isn’t he?’

‘Revelry, as well. He’s Dionysus in Greek. Painters give him crowns of grapes and vine leaves, yes.’ When she had delivered her speech Clio regretted her pedantry, but Grace seemed as always to be glad of the information.

‘Mmm, you’ll do for him, then. What shall I be?’

‘Helen of Troy,’ Clio said. She would have gone on to make some wry observation on the distinction between her brother and Paris, but Grace good-humouredly interrupted her. Grace didn’t seem to know anything about Helen of Troy.

‘Listen, Dr Harris is calling. They must want us for something.’ She held out her arm again and Clio took it. There was no sense in being resentful of Grace. Grace herself did not harbour resentment. But then, Clio reflected, she had no reason to.

Oswald Harris was directing preparations for a wide game. He waved his arms in excitable sweeps, ordering children in different directions. Hugo forgot his dignity and ran with Julius and Clio and the Harris children.

‘You are the quarry,’ Dr Harris called after them. ‘Run, now.’

He turned back to the depleted circle gathered around the remains of the picnic. ‘Jake and Grace, you are the hunters. Give them five minutes exactly.’

They waited, not looking at each other, paying exaggerated attention to counting the seconds.

Eleanor and Mary Harris leant against the trunk of an elm tree, talking in low voices. A little distance away Nathaniel lay on the rug, propped on one elbow. Tabby had fallen asleep beside him, and he had placed his old panama hat to shade her head. He was watching Alice who made little lunging rushes to and fro through the tufts of tall grass. He saw her tilt her head backwards to follow the flight of a white butterfly, and as it rose she leant too far backwards and overbalanced. She lay on her back, staring at the sky from under the brim of her cotton sunbonnet. The butterfly still hovered above her, and in her fascination she forgot to cry.

Nathaniel saw the wide meadow dotted with sheaves of corn, and the willows on the opposite bank of the river, and Jake vaulting the gate into the next field before opening it to let Grace through. He heard the women murmuring, and the creak and splash of a skiff on the river, and one of the Harris children, a long way off, calling a taunt to the hunters.

Along the borders of Eastern Prussia, the Russian soldiers of General Samsonov’s Second Army were being cut down by German shellfire. With the sun hot on his bare head and the afternoon’s warmth beginning to build into oppressive stillness, Nathaniel imagined the thunder of the guns, and the stench of burning, and sudden death.

The same world contained these two realities: the picnic and the battlefield, and Nathaniel knew that the threads that bound them together were tightening, drawing them closer every day.

At home in London the exhibition hall at Olympia had been converted into a camp for aliens. Hundreds of Germans living in England had been rounded up and imprisoned there, and many more had suffered the ransacking of their homes on suspicion of being enemy spies. Only two days earlier, a policeman had come to visit Nathaniel. He had left his bicycle leaning against the stone steps leading up to the front door in the Woodstock Road, and when the outraged housemaid had shown him into Nathaniel’s study he had stood awkwardly on the threshold, turning his helmet over and over in his hands.

‘I’m sorry, Professor Hirsh,’ he kept saying.

‘What do you want to do?’ Nathaniel asked him. ‘Search this room for coded messages to General von Hindenburg? Arrest me for treason?’ The conversations he had had with John Leominster seemed prophetic now, not comical at all.

‘Of course not, sir,’ the man said miserably. ‘It’s a matter of formality. It’s this DORA, isn’t it?’

Nathaniel wondered what else the powers of the Defence of the Realm Act might bring, and what his children would have to suffer for bearing a name that he was proud of.

In the sunny meadow he scrambled to his feet and ran to where Alice lay on the grass. He scooped her up and touched his lips to the warm baby flesh at the back of her neck.

‘I love you,’ he murmured to her. ‘
Ich liebe dich
.’

Jake and Grace stood face to face in an angle of the hedge, hidden from the world by a green buttress of hawthorn branches.

‘I love you,’ Jake said hotly. The taunting calls of their hidden quarry filled the heavy air like the cries of birds. Jake didn’t care about anything except Grace, and the dampness of her skin under the weight of her hair, and the pulse of her throat just above the white collar of her dress. He fixed his eyes on the fluttering beat of it.

‘Jake …’

She touched his face, and then his black hair, still slick and wet with river water. The gesture reminded him of his mother’s and he snatched her wrist and held it.

‘Don’t say anything,’ he begged her. ‘Just be here. Just like this …’

He put his hands around her waist. It was narrow, the fragility of her body surprised and stirred him. He could feel the curve of her ribs, and the soft small swellings above. His hands rested there, he didn’t dare to move them, and he was afraid that his knees would give way beneath him.

Jake bent his head, darkening her face with his own shadow. He touched her mouth with his own and his tongue found her teeth like a barrier, and then she opened her mouth and it was hotter and wetter than his own. He kissed her, drinking her in as if he had been dying of thirst.

Her head fell back, baring her throat, and her straw hat with its wilting Dionysian garland dropped off and lay at their feet.