All My Sins Remembered (78 page)

Cressida turned away from the desolate garden. The knotted strands of an unpruned clematis wound through the rusting wrought-iron lace of the balcony, with a few brittle leaves and tufts of beard-like seedhead still clinging to the shoots. She twisted off a single leaf and let it drift down to settle on the tussocky grass.

Cressida was too much used to her own company to feel bored or neglected. But she would have admitted that the mournful silence of the house had begun to oppress her. Aunt Eleanor did what she could, but her terrible anxiety for Alice was too close to the surface. Sometimes when she was talking about something else, some trivial business to do with running the house or her Oxford voluntary work, she would stop as if she could no longer will herself to make the words, and her eyes would fill up with tears.

‘Don’t cry, Aunt Eleanor,’ was all Cressida could say. ‘They will come home, you’ll see they will.’

Sometimes Tabby was there. Tabby had an inner strength that seemed to be truly God-given. It shone out of her, in her calmness and mildness, but she was never able to impart even a fraction of it to her mother and cousin.

‘We must pray,’ Tabby told them with her luminous smile.

‘I can’t pray,’ Eleanor would wail at her. ‘Do you think I haven’t tried? But I can’t do it. I don’t know how to.’

Her husband and her children had been her religion for almost forty years. It was too late to find another creed now.

‘I don’t believe in God,’ Cressida said, with one of her challenging stares.

‘God believes in
you
,’ Tabby murmured, before bicycling away to one of her bible classes.

Remembering this, Cressida made a small impatient noise and came in from the balcony. Her gloomy survey of the garden had made her feel cold, and she was wondering if, after all, it might not have been a better choice to go up to her grandmother at Stretton. Only since Grandpa Leominster had died Grandma seemed content to sit in her little drawing room and read an endless supply of novels with her husband’s dogs snoring at her feet, and Cressida never knew what to say to her uncle Hugo. The house in the Woodstock Road had always seemed such a fountain of liveliness and warmth in comparison with Stretton. Only now, without Nathaniel and Clio, all the light had gone.

Cressida wondered where Alice was, and what she might be having to endure at this moment. She remembered how she had looked through the keyhole and seen her hunched, motionless shape on the bed.

Shivering a little, Cressida closed the French doors. The drawing room overlooking the garden held the same muddle of books, manuscripts and sheet music spilling over the unpolished furniture as it always had done. She stepped over the rippled oriental rugs and took her book off the piano where she had left it. She was settling down to read with her knees drawn up as a bookrest, when she heard the front doorbell ring.

From somewhere in the house she heard Aunt Eleanor materializing on her way to answer it. Her heels clicked across the coloured stars and diamonds of the Victorian tiles in the hallway. Immediately there was a murmur of voices. Cressida could distinguish a man’s low rumble.

A moment later the drawing-room door opened. There was indeed a man, but it was no one Cressida recognized. He had wiry grey hair, worn long and flowing over his ears. He had a beard too, less luxuriant that Nathaniel’s, with yellowish tufts at the corners of his mouth. He was dressed in some kind of long dark cape, and he carried a large hat with a curled brim.

Cressida folded away her book and stood up politely, ready to be introduced to her aunt’s guest.

‘This is my great-niece, Cressida Brock,’ Eleanor said. ‘And Cressida, this is Mr Pilgrim. The painter, you know.’

‘How do you do?’ Cressida said.

The man swept forward and seemed to loom over her. He had sharp eyes under heavy lids and his clothes carried the smell that she had sometimes noticed in summertime when the doors of public houses were left open on to the pavement.

‘Cressida Brock,’ he said, with a long, drawn-out theatrical inflection. ‘As lovely as her mama ever was.’ He took her hand and lifted it to his whiskery beard.

‘Mr Pilgrim is a friend of your Aunt Clio, and of your mother too. The portrait is his work.’

Cressida glanced up at
The Janus Face
.

‘What do you think of it?’ Pilgrim asked, looking at her intently.

Cressida was used to the violence of the straining limbs and staring eyes, and the lascivious attention given to the naked skin and coiling masses of multi-coloured hair. She also knew that the artist had an international reputation and that the picture was now worth an enormous amount of money. It was a kind of joke in the Hirsh household that it was more valuable than the Stretton Sargent and was still left to hang in its old place, on permanent loan from the artist. But she did not much like it as a portrait of her mother and aunt.

‘I think it is admirable,’ she said carefully.

The painter gave a surprising hoot of laughter. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘That’s my girl.’

Then he turned his attention back to Eleanor. He had called unexpectedly, hoping to find Nathaniel and an early glass or two of beer. Instead here was Eleanor wringing her hands over some disaster that had befallen her youngest child in Berlin, and the utterly unexpected apparition of Grace’s daughter. The child was practically grown-up. In his imagination she was still a dough-faced infant.

‘Eleanor, you must go back to your letters. I have no intention of interrupting your afternoon. I don’t need tea, or any attention at all.’ Then he smiled. ‘Perhaps Cressida will keep me company for half an hour.’

Eleanor looked doubtful. Then Pilgrim twirled round as if he had just had a wonderful idea. ‘Perhaps I could
draw
her. I would like to so much. The family resemblance, you know.’

Eleanor’s face cleared as her vague anxieties about chaperonage drifted away. Clio and Grace had been left to sit for Pilgrim, after all, long ago.

‘Well, I suppose. If Cressida would like it …’

Pilgrim had already produced a flat tin of charcoal sticks from one of his pockets. He was prowling about the room squinting at the light and turning over manuscript sheets in search of a suitable piece of paper.

‘I don’t mind,’ Cressida said.

When Eleanor had gone, Pilgrim sat back to look at the child. He had placed her on the piano stool with her face half turned to the light from the tall windows.

He was enchanted. His daughter was a beauty.

Grace had been fiercely protective over the years. Pilgrim had seen Cressida just once, when she was a baby.

He remembered exclaiming, ‘Why is the young of the human species so
extravagantly
ugly?’

After that it had been made clear that he was no longer a friend of the Brocks. He had never visited their house after that one time, and on the rare occasions when the separate threads of their London lives had crossed Grace had ignored him as far as possible. Pilgrim had not minded particularly. His paternal instincts were not highly developed, and it had never worried him that Anthony Brock had died with his belief intact that Cressida was his own.

But now that he saw Cressida, he felt differently. She was, he calculated, just over sixteen years old. She had a solemn, narrow face with pronounced cheekbones and wide-set eyes. The irises were so dark that they looked plum-coloured. She looked like her mother, except for her hands and some of the movements she made. These spoke eloquently to Pilgrim of himself.

‘Is this all right?’ Cressida asked, nervously gesturing with those broad hands. She found that she was disconcerted by the man’s scrutiny.

‘Just relax. Find a comfortable position and then hold it,’ he said briskly, as if she were any other model.

Cressida squared her shoulders. At least she was thin now, she thought. She had willed herself into slimness two years ago, and even now she still ate as little as she could despite the constant gnawing of hunger. She was pleased with the results of her will-power now. It felt glamorous and adult to be sitting for a famous painter. It was the kind of thing that her mother did.

Pilgrim began to draw. He made strong, black strokes on the blank paper.

‘Tell me what has happened to – Alice, is it? In Berlin?’

Cressida told him, and he listened with sympathy.

‘And so your mother sent you to Oxford, while she is away?’

‘Yes. For Aunt Eleanor to look after me. And for me to keep Aunt Eleanor company.’

‘An excellent arrangement,’ Pilgrim said. ‘You can keep me company too. I have to be in Oxford for a few days, so perhaps I may call in the afternoons, and you can sit for me?’

‘I would like that,’ Cressida said truthfully. The prospect of a visitor of her own, and an important one who was making a drawing of her, was much more interesting than a series of empty afternoons. And she was intrigued by this Pilgrim. He was odd to look at but she liked the way he talked, and the way he stared at her as if he wanted to see inside her head. She didn’t think that anyone had ever paid her such close attention before.

‘Go on talking,’ Pilgrim ordered.

Cressida did as she was told. She talked about Vincent Street, and about Grace’s work, and about Alice and the Blackshirts, and about herself.

Later, when Pilgrim had drawn enough, with Eleanor’s permission they went for a walk in the University Parks. The sharp November air drew colour into Cressida’s cheeks and Pilgrim watched her with deepening fascination as she talked. Once she had properly begun, and discovered the luxury of an attentive audience, the words seemed to spill out of her. Cressida was clever, and the long hours she had spent alone had given her an original turn of mind. She had opinions on surprising topics, from politics to Darwinism, and she seemed to have read a great many books.

Pilgrim listened to everything she said with admiration and the beginnings of pride.

When he escorted her back to the Woodstock Road, he promised that he would call again the next afternoon. He came exactly as he had promised, and spent another hour working on his drawing. Afterwards they walked again, along the banks of the Cherwell under the lachrymose branches of the willow trees.

There was another day, and the day after that. The little charcoal drawing was nearly complete, even though Pilgrim worked as slowly as he could. Cressida opened like a flower under the warmth of his attention and approval.

‘Are we friends?’ she asked once, turning to look at him and at the same time childishly skipping backwards so as not to break the rhythm of their walk.

He made her stop, and took her hands. ‘Of course,’ he answered, with what struck her as unusual seriousness. ‘More than friends.’

Cressida waited, but he did not elaborate.

In Berlin, Grace was granted another audience with the Führer.

She was escorted through the same corridors of the Reichskanzlerai, but this time to a huge office with a great polished desk set under the red folds of crossed Nazi flags. Stormtroopers stood stiffly to attention beside the doors and between the windows. But the Führer himself stood up courteously when she was shown in, and even came round his desk to shake her hand.

Grace took the chair that he indicated, folding her hands in her lap to hide their shaking. He waited, with one eyebrow raised, polite but cold. For all the formal display of civility she was not here as a friend now, she realized. Not like last time. The thought of the long corridors at her back, closely guarded and separating her from the light and air, made her shiver as if she was sick. Renewed fear for Alice gripped her at the same instant.

She began to apologize for whatever it was that Alice had done. Alice was young, a stranger to Germany, inexperienced. She had meant no harm, to the Führer or to anyone else. If she could be released, her imprisonment up until now a sufficient punishment for her foolishness, her family was waiting for her in Berlin. They would take her home at once.

Hitler inclined his head. It was a small matter. A triviality, as far as he was personally concerned. But there were formalities to be observed, and the details were not in his own hands. To emphasize his point he spread his manicured fingers in front of her.

Lady Grace must rest assured that everything necessary would be done to secure her young cousin’s early release, and the conclusion of this unfortunate matter.

That was all.

A moment later Grace was outside the heavy doors, steered by the stormtroopers towards the daylight.

Nathaniel and Julius and Rafael were waiting for her.

‘I don’t know,’ Grace blurted out. ‘He was polite, he said everything would be done that could be done, and that we must just wait.’

There was nothing else she could offer them, when they had clearly hoped for much more. She had half convinced herself, when the summons came, that Alice would be conjured up from wherever she was being held so that Grace could carry her home in triumph. She had a colder vision now.

‘It was magnificent that you saw him at all,’ Nathaniel said, but he was unable to hide his heaviness. It was Julius who came to her and felt her shaking. He guided her to a chair and sat holding her in his arms until the spasm had passed.

‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘You are here with me now.’

Rafael and Nathaniel left them. Nathaniel was spending hours of his time at the Embassy, pleading their case with whichever diplomat was available, and Rafael was busy with the legal needs of the shattered families who had belonged to his own circle, and with what remained of his Jewish resistance group. Grace let her head fall against Julius’s shoulder. She could have wept for crumbling ideals and for her own distorted visions, but she would not let herself.

Julius tilted her chin in his fingers and then outlined the shape of her mouth with one fingertip.

Grace recognized the happiness in his eyes. Julius’s old, hesitant manner had gone. He was confident now. At last, after so many years, it was appropriate to acknowledge the feelings he had disguised for so long. It made her look at him quite differently; she read a hundred things in him, as well as the happiness, that she had never seen before. There was something new in herself too. It was inconceivable that they should be happy here and now, but there was the fact of it.