All My Sins Remembered (28 page)

Pilgrim was tired. He had had almost no sleep the night before, and he was barely sober now. The girl was lovely, but she was sexually naïve. Of course she was, he told himself, how could she be otherwise? And this was not the time to begin her education. There would be other times, he decided. More leisurely times, he would teach her what to do …

He stopped thinking, and gave himself up to enjoying her.

Grace held him in her arms, wondering if his groans meant that she was doing something wrong. She tightened her hold when he gave a defeated bellow and collapsed on top of her.

The movements stopped, and from that she knew it was over. She felt a small but definite pang of regret. That was it, she told herself. She had irrevocably crossed the divide from childhood into womanhood. The portentousness of the thought made her wish for a grander setting than the divan and a louder fanfare than Pilgrim’s shout.

Pilgrim moved sleepily, and then hauled himself up to look at her. He cupped one hand under her chin, and the tenderness of the gesture consoled her.

‘That’s the first time out of the way,’ he excused himself. ‘The best thing about it is that it leads to the second and third.’

Grace allowed herself to be reassured. This was only a beginning, then. The impatient sensation that he had stirred in her slowly faded away, and she felt ordinary again.

Pilgrim lit a cigarette, and she settled in the crook of his arm. It was comfortable to lie with her cheek on his chest, listening to the muffled drum of his heartbeat. She rested one leg across his, looking down at the whiteness of her thigh against the black fur of his. It came to her that she was comfortable with her nakedness, calm and pensive, as Jeannie had looked in the pictures.

Grace smiled. She was here now, and she and Pilgrim were a part of one another. She loved him. She was glad to have crossed the divide.

He slid his hand over her ribs, to rest in the hollow of her waist. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked her.

To her surprise, Grace discovered that she was.

‘Let’s go to the Eiffel, then,’ Pilgrim said briskly.

He watched her putting on her clothes. ‘If we are going to do this again …’

‘I want to,’ Grace said. She was determined to be honest in her new maturity.

‘… If we are, you need to fix yourself up. Perhaps you could talk to Jeannie.’ Pilgrim was vague, leaving the suggestion hanging between them.

Grace nodded, having only a faint idea that he was referring to something women did, and knowing that she couldn’t possibly discuss anything of the kind with Jeannie. She presented her back to Pilgrim, so that he could do up her buttons for her.

The Eiffel was crowded.

Grace saw a quartet in evening dress at a table near the door, and recognized them as acquaintances from Belgrave Square. They must be having an early supper before seeing some dull show, she thought, and congratulating themselves on their daring in venturing into the raffish Eiffel Tower. She waved at them, and airily passed by on Pilgrim’s arm.

Pilgrim’s friend Nina and a crowd of others were sitting at his table. There was a chorus of greetings as chairs were moved up to make room for them. Grace looked around, and was faintly disappointed to see that there was no sign of Jeannie or the silver girl. But there were half a dozen others she recognized, and she saw that they all looked back at her.

Did they know? Grace wondered. Could they see it in her eyes?

Her face glowed above her crumpled collar, and the men in the group shifted in the hope that she might sit next to them.

On the other side of Pilgrim, Max Erdmann muttered, ‘So it’s the other one tonight, is it?’

Pilgrim grinned, making no attempt to hide his pleasure and satisfaction. ‘What is a man supposed to do? Beat them off with a stick?’

‘I have no idea. My problems tend in the opposite direction. But do you really need two of them?’

Pilgrim half closed his eyes, still smiling. ‘Is it not your experience, Max, that every woman is invariably lacking in some department? This arrangement is perfection itself. There is one for conversation and company, and one for bed, according to their natural aptitudes. It is like having one woman, with twice the variety and none of the drawbacks. The female Janus. I’ve painted her, and now I’m enjoying her.’

‘How fortunate you are,’ Max said, with noticeable dislike. Pilgrim returned his attention to Grace.

‘Grace, would you like the
plat du jour
?’ he invited, mindful as always of his bill. Grace smiled her acquiescence. She knew that this evening, in her happiness, whatever she ate would taste like ambrosia.

Nathaniel and Eleanor always liked to give a party at Christmas, although for the years of the war it had been a muted affair. Now, at the end of 1919, they had decided that they must compensate with a bigger and much more splendid event. It would be their own celebration of the first year of peace, of Jake’s and Julius’s proper emergence into the world, and of Clio’s coming out.

The party would also celebrate the hanging, in the drawing room overlooking the garden at Woodstock Road, of Pilgrim’s double portrait.

Pilgrim had declined to sell
The Janus Face
to Nathaniel, to Nathaniel’s private relief because he suspected he couldn’t possibly have afforded to pay for it, even for the sake of teasing his brother-in-law. It had been Pilgrim’s own suggestion that he should bring the picture to Oxford, and leave it there on indefinite loan.

The painter had been a lively and welcome guest. Pilgrim had obviously enjoyed the comfortable informality of Eleanor’s household and his planned overnight stay to supervise the hanging had somehow stretched to a week.

‘It’s just like home,’ he said expansively, although he never offered any more information about his own domestic life. Clio knew that according to Charlotte Street gossip, Pilgrim lived in some bleak rooms in Tottenham, and only ever returned to them when in dire need of some refinement like clean clothes or hot water that was unavailable either in his studio or someone else’s more conveniently situated residence.

Nathaniel liked him. The two men sat underneath the portrait in its place of honour on the long wall facing the garden, and argued about politics, pictures and Wagner. Pilgrim was gallant to Eleanor, insisting that she was by far the ripest and loveliest of the quartet of women, until she blushed and protested.

And Clio fell deeper in love with him. Pilgrim occupied the tower room that had been Peter Dennis’s, and his robust presence exorcized the paler ghost. Pilgrim’s behaviour towards Clio was impeccable, to her slight regret. He took her to tea at Tripps’, not counting the cost of chocolate cakes, and then marched her around the pictures in the Ashmolean Museum. They were familiar to her, but he made her see them with different eyes. He made her walk around the circumference of the Radcliffe Camera and lift her head to examine the lines of the Bodleian and the Sheldonian Theatre. All of these things had been familiar to her from childhood, but in Pilgrim’s company they were new and fascinating.

Over their tea in Tripps’ he also warned her not to waste too much of her life in learning instead of doing.

‘What do you mean?’ she had asked him.

‘Do you really want to spend years buried in some library here, or chaperoned by women dons whenever you set foot outside the College walls? You’ve seen Oxford now. What about the rest of the world?’

‘It isn’t quite like that,’ she had protested, but she had begun to think, much more seriously than his casual remark had warranted.

All the Hirshes missed him when he went back to London. Tabby and Alice begged him to come back soon and draw more animal pictures for them. Nathaniel and Eleanor told him that he was welcome to visit the Woodstock Road whenever he wanted to.

‘Won’t you come to our Christmas party, to celebrate the portrait?’ Eleanor begged. Eleanor had calmly accepted the defiant, semi-naked representation of her daughter and niece. Nathaniel admired the portrait, and that was good enough for Eleanor.

Pilgrim bent over to kiss her hand. ‘If only I could,’ he lamented. ‘But I must go to Paris. Work, work.’

The truth was that he had promised Isolde a holiday trip. The use of an apartment on the Cité had been promised to him by two painters he knew. He felt well fed and well rested from his week in Oxford, and after Clio’s receptive intelligence and thoughtful questions he was more than ready to divert himself with Isolde in Paris.

Clio came with him to the gate, where a taxi was waiting to take him to Oxford station. He took off his big black hat with a sweep of his arm and kissed her on the mouth. Clio saw that he was glitter-eyed, looking forward to his next adventure.

‘I shall miss you,’ she said in a small voice.

‘I hope so. But not too much.’

Pilgrim clapped his hat on his head again, and subsided into the taxi. Clio wandered back into the house, wondering if it was her permanent fate to be in love and lonely all at the same time.

The party was to be held three days before Christmas.

Nathaniel loved making the excuse of his Gentile family for decorating the house before the festival. A huge fir tree was always stationed in the hall and decorated with carved wooden ornaments and silver stars and gingerbread figures suspended on scarlet ribbons. Holly garlands were made for the mantelshelves, and Nathaniel always led a children’s excursion to Port Meadow, where mistletoe grew among the branches of one of the trees. Tabitha and Alice hung paper streamers and lanterns from the cornices, and Clio helped them to set out the beautifully detailed and painted Nativity scene that Eleanor had inherited from Holborough.

Nathaniel regarded all this, and the singing of carols and hanging-up of stockings, with impartial pleasure.

‘A feast is a feast,’ he said, ‘whatever religion it belongs to.’

This year the decoration was done earlier than usual so that the house would look festive for the party. Eleanor and Mrs Doyle, assisted by Clio, embarked on a marathon of cooking. There would be more than sixty people for dinner, and afterwards Julius and his friends would play music for dancing. The worn Persian rugs in the drawing room were taken up in readiness, laying bare the fine oak parquet floor. Eleanor’s housemaid spent a whole day waxing and polishing it. The Janus portrait gazed down at the preparations. It had looked perfectly comfortable in the Woodstock Road from the moment it had been hung amongst the books and music stands and manuscripts.

Clio had a new dress for the occasion. At last she had achieved the ink-blue velvet she had dreamt of for her coming out. She went to Elliston’s and bought the material herself, and Nanny Cooper helped her to cut and sew it into a narrow column that rippled when she moved. She was pleased with the effect, and told herself that she would look just as elegant as Grace in her Reville & Rossiter. If only Pilgrim were coming, she thought wistfully. She would not have minded at all letting Grace see that they were such good friends after a whole week spent together.

The Stretton party arrived from London on the afternoon of the party. They would stay overnight, and then travel on to Stretton for the Christmas holidays. John was not with them. He had no wish to join in any celebration of Pilgrim’s notorious picture, and had instructed Blanche and the four children to ignore the painting as far as possible. Blanche told Eleanor, and Eleanor told Nathaniel, who roared with delighted laughter at the absurdity of it all.

‘I am looking forward to seeing Hugo doing his duty and standing with his back to it all the evening,’ he said gleefully. As a tease, the whole business of the portrait hanging had exceeded his best expectations.

Grace was quiet when the family party reached the Woodstock Road. She barely spoke to Clio, and hardly seemed to notice Jake and Julius. She announced that the journey had been tiring and that she was going to lie down. No one saw her again until the evening began.

At seven o’clock, everyone was assembling downstairs ready to meet the guests. All the children were to be allowed to stay up for dinner, even Alice who ran up and down the hallway between Phoebe and Tabitha in a state of wild over-excitement. The Oswald Harrises had already arrived and were greeting Nathaniel and Eleanor when Grace finally came down the stairs. She was wearing an ivory lace dress, with Blanche’s magnificent pearl and diamond choker at her throat and an ivory fillet in her hair. Her eyes were very wide, and there was an unusual flush of colour high on her cheekbones.

Clio heard Julius draw in his breath when he looked up and saw Grace at the head of the stairs.

Julius went forward and took Grace’s hand as she came down.

‘You look very beautiful,’ he said. She turned her head, meeting his eyes, but she did not smile.

The Hirshes’ guests flooded in, neighbours and Nathaniel’s colleagues, past and present students who were still near enough to Oxford to reach it in the middle of the Christmas vacation, musicians and clergymen and philosophers. Hugo hobbled about on his stick, nobly making conversation as if he were at a tenants’ ball, with Thomas doing his best to imitate him. The younger children carried plates, and the smell of food mingled with the scents of pine branches and mulled wine. Grace’s high colour faded, and she began to look as ivory pale as her dress. Julius never took his eyes off her. Once, seeing her pallor, Jake asked her if she felt all right. She fixed him with a wide-eyed stare. ‘Never better,’ she answered.

After dinner the dancing began. Nathaniel smiled to see the Strettons carefully not looking at the portrait. All except Grace. She stared at it, her pale face quite expressionless. From across the room, Clio watched her. She felt less pleased with her blue velvet dress, less than satisfied with the whole evening. A dull feeling of apprehension gnawed at her innards, although she had no idea why she should feel apprehensive.

Julius played the fiddle for the dancers, waltzes and foxtrots and one-steps, but he longed to leave the other musicians to play and step through the crowd to Grace. He knew that her cheek would feel cool against his, and that she would bend with him like a reed in the dance.