All My Sins Remembered (21 page)

Clio was priggishly dismissing her season as a frivolous nonsense. She was only enduring it because it pleased her mother to see her, and because what pleased Eleanor also pleased Nathaniel. She would have been reluctant to admit to her dreams of meeting an interesting man. Clio was sure that she was still in love with Captain Dennis.

Victor Zuckerman was asking her to dance.

‘Thank you,’ Clio said meekly, and let him take her hand.

‘Jolly good band,’ Victor tried, not quite managing a convincing imitation of Hugo or one of his friends. He smelt strongly of whisky. Clio looked at him, trying to gauge his expression behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. His hand felt burningly hot in the small of her back. But at least he danced in time to the music. He might not trample on the toes of her satin slippers.

‘Do you think so? It is the third time I’ve heard them this week. Familiarity must be breeding contempt.’

Over Mr Zuckerman’s shoulder she saw Grace’s partner leading her back to her place. Grace was still laughing, with her head close to his. Grace would always find something to enjoy, however dismal and predictable the occasion, Clio knew that. And yet she had been sent to finishing school in Switzerland as soon as the war ended. She had made new friends, travelled to Italy, had her horizons enviably broadened. Clio could not understand her pleasure in this boring ritual.

‘That’s a jolly pretty dress,’ Mr Zuckerman offered.

‘Thank you.’ Clio couldn’t help smiling at him, he was trying so hard. Her dress had been made by Eleanor’s Oxford dressmaker. It was paper-white taffeta, with a tendency to collapse into concave panels instead of standing out in a stiff bell. The same dressmaker had made her two other ballgowns, one shell-pink and one powder-blue with darker blue bows. Clio had wanted rippling gold satin and ink-blue velvet, but Eleanor had insisted that neither was suitable.

Grace had been taken to Reville & Rossiter for her ballgowns. The London couture house was not quite Paris, of course, but it was good enough. Her dress tonight was oyster-white silk, tight-bodiced and pannier-skirted, with a hooped overskirt of the finest white net that made her look as if she was dancing in a halo of light. It was a romantic denial of all the sensible plain tunics of the war years.

Clio looked away from where Grace was being led back into the dancing by a different partner. She tried to ignore the bitterness that she felt, telling herself that she should rise loftily above it. But it was difficult not to be aware of the gulf between the two of them, just because the whole evening seemed to emphasize it.

The dance itself was being held in the Strettons’ house, whereas Clio and her family had travelled up from the increasingly battered and down-at-heel household in the Woodstock Road. Even the stiff engraved invitations declared the difference between Lady Grace Stretton and Miss Clio Hirsh.

Clio was not ashamed of her Jewish name. She was fiercely proud of her father and his academic reputation. But she was sensitive enough to have noticed in the past weeks that other people spoke her name in a certain way, looked at her in another certain way, with a flicker of speculation. ‘The father is Jewish, of course,’ she had once overheard one matron whisper to another.

Clio frowned, anger stiffening her spine a little. She looked across to where Dora Hirsh was sitting on a gilt chair. Levi Hirsh was dead, but Nathaniel’s mother was alert and straight-backed, a tiny figure in a shiny black dress with her black and gold net purse clasped on her lap. It was Dora’s money, mostly, that was paying for the band and the wilting flowers, and the bland chicken and dryish trifle that they would be eating later. Clio tried to convey love and pride and solidarity across the room to her grandmother. She was glad to see that Jake was sitting beside Dora on another gilt chair, volubly talking.

‘Are you all right?’ Victor Zuckerman asked. He must have felt Clio’s stiffness. ‘Didn’t tread on you, did I?’

It came to Clio that her partner was almost certainly Jewish too. She smiled at him with real warmth. ‘Of course not. You’re a good dancer.’

Victor beamed. He had just noticed that Hirsh’s rather prim and silent sister was extremely pretty when she smiled. Instinctively he held her closer, letting himself imagine her legs under the swathes of taffeta.

The room grew hotter. Clio danced with Jake, and then with one of the medical students who told her he was her brother’s dissection partner. They shared a cadaver between them, he said proudly. Clio thought she could detect a faint smell of formalin clinging about him, reminding her of the Pitt-Rivers.

The more elderly relatives were beginning to make their way to the supper-tables in the library when Blanche tapped Clio on the arm. ‘I don’t think you have met Mr Brock, Clio, have you? His mother was a cousin of your mother’s and mine on the Earley side.’

It was the man Grace had been laughing with. Clio saw that his evening clothes and his fairish hair were as conventionally cut as John Leominster’s, but his long, humorous face and a gap between his front teeth made him look immediately interesting, even rakish.

‘Anthony Brock,’ he said, taking her hand. Blanche had already moved away, having done her duty with yet another introduction. Clio had a momentary impression of a sea of polite pink faces, drifting away from her into oblivion, before she focused on Anthony’s.

‘I saw you dancing with my cousin Grace,’ she said, and, before she could stop herself, ‘What were you both laughing at so much?’

Anthony grinned. His well-dressed-brigand look intensified. ‘Ah, about the rituals and rigours of doing the Season. About all this, I suppose.’

One small movement of his forefinger took in the crowd, and everything that had seemed dismal about it to Clio at once became less depressing.

‘I was going to ask if I might have the honour of escorting you into supper?’

No one else had asked her. She answered with the same ironic formality. ‘With pleasure.’

The supper room was only half full, and it looked pretty with shaded candles on the little round tables. Clio’s spirits lifted further. Anthony Brock brought her a plate of the inevitable sauced chicken, and poured hock into her glass. Clio learnt that he worked in the City, in his father’s stockbroking company, but had ambitions to enter Parliament. He had fought in France, but it wasn’t until later that she heard from elsewhere that he had been awarded the MC.

‘And you?’ he asked.

Clio blushed. ‘I’m going up to Oxford. Modern languages.’

‘Are you, now?’ Anthony drank his wine reflectively. ‘You look very like your cousin,’ he told her.

‘I know.’ She was aware that he was studying her face. His head was a little on one side, as if he were making some decision. He put his glass down on the white cloth, matching up the foot to the faint circle left by its own weight. Then he said softly, ‘I told Grace that I was going to marry her. I don’t think she believed me.’

Clio felt her small, presumptuous glow of happiness dwindle and fade. Nothing changed, the half-eaten chicken on her plate retained the same consistency and the candles under their shades threw the same soft light, but the supper room was ordinary again, and the faces around them once more in focus, pink and solid.

She lifted her head. She was glad that he was so direct. It was a relief not to have been left to cherish an illusion, a pointless illusion.

‘I don’t suppose she disbelieved the intention. It isn’t quite unique.’ Clio couldn’t keep all the sharpness out of her voice. It was true, in any case. Grace had accumulated several admirers and more than one proposal in the course of the Season. Clio herself had had her share, although she couldn’t imagine herself accepting any one of the offers. She thought they were oddly flippant. There was a desperation under the gaiety of it all that made her think that the men who had survived wanted nothing more than to turn their backs on what they had experienced, with any woman, the first to hand.

She hadn’t talked about this to Grace, although she wondered if she felt the same. For all their present enforced intimacy, the two of them spoke only in superficialities. They were still wary, after their year’s separation.

She went on, trying to sound kind. ‘It’s just that I don’t think Grace wants to marry anyone at all. Not yet.’

Anthony was perfectly composed. ‘I can wait,’ he said. ‘But I will marry her, in the end.’

Clio laughed then in spite of herself, liking him, and at the same time remembering how she had seen Grace laughing too. ‘I shall enjoy watching the chase. I wish you the best of luck.’ She meant the good wishes and Anthony saw that she did. He put out his hand again.

‘Shall we be friends?’ he asked her.

‘By all means,’ Clio said, shaking it. And so Anthony Brock became her friend as she became his ally in the pursuit of Grace.

The evening was far from over. There were more introductions and more small talk, and yet more dances contracted for, entered on the card, and limply undertaken. Clio took her turn with the swarthy Mr Vaughan, the chronically nervous Mr Armstrong, her brothers, and Hugo’s friend Farmiloe. Hugo could not dance, but he was not short of company on his sofa to one side of the hideous chimney-piece. Hugo represented a catch, of course, and all the mothers were interested in him. Even Clio understood and accepted as much, even though it was plain that her own brothers were far cleverer and more handsome than the Viscount.

At last, when it seemed that there was not another lungful of air left in the ballroom, the trickle of girls and chaperones making their thanks to Blanche and Eleanor became a steady stream. Eleanor was leaning on Nathaniel’s arm, with Blanche on his other side. John was in the card room, where most of the remaining men had retired to play bridge and smoke cigars. The sisters were weary but satisfied. They had achieved an evening neither more nor less remarkable than a hundred others. Their daughters had looked prettier than most of their competitors, they had danced every dance, and all the requirements of the occasion had been met.

‘Did you enjoy yourself, darling?’ Eleanor asked Clio when they found themselves looking at an empty floor littered with the bruised petals from corsages and tassels dropped from dance cards.

‘It was wonderful, thank you,’ Clio said dutifully. ‘I’ll always remember it.’

Grace had been patting a cloud of net into place around her white shoulders, but now she lifted her head and caught Clio’s eye. Her expression was one of such wicked mockery and humour and conspiracy that Clio had to look away quickly to suppress a snort of laughter. It came to her that Grace was her partner in all of this, her fellow and contemporary. Eleanor and Blanche, even Nathaniel, belonged to a remote generation. They are
Victorians
, Clio thought. She found herself wishing that she and Grace were better friends.

Upstairs in the faintly chilly bedroom Clio took off the paper taffeta dress and hung it up. She stood in her petticoats in front of the looking glass to unpin her hair. The house was quiet at last. The bulbous mahogany bedroom suite gleamed faintly in the dim light of one electric bulb. The bed had been turned down ready for her, and there was tepid water in the ewer on the washstand, left for her by the maid. Clio splashed some of it into the white china bowl with the Leominster crest and carefully washed her face.

She was pulling her nightdress over her head, shivering as she thought of the cold, stiff linen sheets waiting for her, when there was a knock at the door. A moment later Grace slid into the room. Her hair was in a plait over the shoulder, and she was wrapped in a flame-coloured silk robe with a golden dragon embroidered on the back. She was giggling, and Clio thought immediately that Grace had managed to put away more of the innocuous white wine than she had done herself. Sober or tipsy, Clio was surprised to see her. Late-night visits to one another’s bedrooms were not a feature of their present relationship.

‘Oh God,’ Grace was whispering, ‘Oh
God
, I thought it would never end. I told myself, if
one
more young man praises the band or asks me how I’m enjoying it all I shall scream until they send for the
fire brigade
.’

‘You looked as if you were enjoying yourself well enough,’ Clio said reasonably. ‘You were laughing so much with Anthony Brock I thought you might be on the point of creating a frisson of interest.’

Grace sighed. ‘Oh, Anthony Brock.’ She flung herself down on Clio’s bed and patted the pocket of her robe. Then she extracted a flat cigarette case and a small gold lighter. She selected a cigarette and snapped her lighter. The flame lit one side of her face with a brief coppery glow, transforming her instantly into a woman of the world.

‘
Grace
.’ Clio was shocked.

Grace held out the case. ‘Want one? No?’ She breathed out a long, efficient plume of smoke and leant back against Clio’s pillows. ‘It’s so bloody cold in here. Get in under the covers, for God’s sake.’

Clio did as she was told. They pulled the heavy blankets up around their shoulders. The cigarette smoke wreathed their heads.

‘Anthony Brock said he’s going to marry me. Didn’t ask me,
told
me.’

‘I know.’

Grace’s eyebrows went up. ‘How?’

‘He said so. At supper. We also agreed to be friends, and shook hands on it.’

‘Cosy.’

‘It was, rather. And so what did you say in response to this news?’

‘Told him I wasn’t going to marry anyone.’ She sighed again, tilting her chin to stare up at the plaster fruit and flowers wreathing the cornice. ‘Oh, Clio. Darling Clio. Why is it always marriage? Is that all there is for us?’

‘Not for me,’ Clio said, with a touch of smugness.

Grace turned on one side then, so that she could see her cousin’s face. ‘You’re right. Not for you. How lucky you are, how very lucky. All there is for me is an extension of tonight. Politeness, and good form, and utter tedium.’

Clio was surprised by her vehemence. ‘You always look happy. I thought you were. Tonight, for instance.’

Grace shrugged. ‘I try to. One has to do that much.’