Contents

       Title Page

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

      Five

      Six

      Seven

      Eight

      Nine

      Ten

      Eleven

      Twelve

      Thirteen

      Fourteen

      Fifteen

      Sixteen

      Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Twenty-one

       Twenty-two

       Twenty-three

       Twenty-four

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by Rosie Thomas

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       London, 1990

      It was a lie, but it was not a lie that could do any damage.

      The writer reflected on the relative harmlessness of what she was doing as she waited on the step for the doorbell to be answered. It was a cold and windy autumn afternoon, and the trees that bordered the canal in Little Venice were shedding their leaves into the water. She had turned away to look at the play of light in the ripples drawn behind a barge when the door opened at last behind her.

      There was a smiling nurse in a blue dress. ‘Mrs Ainger, hello there. Come in, now.’

      ‘How is she today?’ Elizabeth Ainger asked.

      ‘Not so bad at all. Quite clear in the head, as a matter of fact. She even asked when you were coming.’

      ‘She’s getting used to me,’ the biographer said. ‘I’m glad it’s one of her good days.’

      The nurse showed her into a drawing room at the rear of the house with a view of a small garden through double doors. There were porcelain ornaments arranged on the marble mantelpiece, a little blue painting of an interior hanging above them, embroidered cushions and faded rose-patterned loose covers. These neat, traditional furnishings were faintly at odds with the picture that hung on the wall behind the old lady’s chair. It was a double portrait, in oils, of two young women. They were looking away from each other, out of the frame of the picture, and there was tension in every line of their bodies. The painter’s peculiarly hectic style owed something to Picasso, and something to Stanley Spencer.

      It was so quiet in the room, away from the noise of the traffic, that the occupant might have been sitting in some cottage in the country instead of in the middle of London.

      ‘Hello, Aunt Clio,’ Elizabeth said. The nurse withdrew, and closed the door behind her.

      The tiny old woman in the velvet-upholstered chair was not really Elizabeth’s aunt, but her grandmother’s first cousin. But it was to ‘Aunt Clio’s’ house in Oxford that Elizabeth had been taken on visits with her mother when she was a little girl. She could just remember the rooms, with their forbidding shelves of dark books, and her childish impression that Aunt Clio was important, but in some way not easy.

      When Elizabeth was seven, her American father had taken his wife and daughter back to live in Oregon, and there had only been birthday cards and Christmas presents from Oxford after that. By the time Elizabeth was grown up herself, and had come back to live in the country of her birth, the links had been all but broken. Until this series of visits had begun, the two women had not met for thirty years.

      Clio turned her head a fraction to look at her visitor. ‘It’s you, is it?’

      Elizabeth smiled and shrugged, deprecatingly held out her tape-recorder.

      ‘I am afraid so. Do you feel too tired to talk today?’

      ‘I am not in the least tired.’

      She did not look it, either. Her body was tiny and frail, but her eyes were bright and sharp like fish caught in their nets of wrinkles. She watched Elizabeth Ainger sitting down, adopting a familiar position in the chair opposite to her own, and fiddling with her little tape-recorder.

      ‘I just wonder why you are not bored to death with all these old tales?’

      With a show of cheerful patience the younger woman answered, ‘You can’t tell me anything that will bore me. I am your biographer, remember?’

      That was the lie, but it came out fluently enough.

      The biography was not of her relative, Clio Hirsh, although she would not have been an inappropriate subject, but of Clio’s first cousin.

      Lady Grace Brock, née Stretton, was Elizabeth’s maternal grand-mother. She was the daughter of an Earl, a famous socialite in her day and then one of the first women Members of Parliament.

      Elizabeth had never met her, but she was fascinated by her. And her enthusiasm had communicated itself to her publisher when they had met to discuss over lunch what Elizabeth’s next project might be as a middle-range, moderately successful author of popular biographies.

      ‘Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard did well enough,’ the published mused. ‘Although your grandmother is not quite so well known, of course. Why don’t you put some material together for us to have a look at?’

      Elizabeth’s mother and the rest of the family had warned her at the outset that Clio was famously reluctant to talk about her cousin and friend. The defences that the old lady duly put up against Elizabeth’s first casual enquiries were infuriating, and impregnable, but she needed her co-operation, and so Elizabeth had pretended that it was a family biography that she was researching, with particular emphasis on Clio’s own life.

      Elizabeth was invited to call at the house in Little Venice. The first visit had led to a series of interviews, and Elizabeth had patiently waited and listened.

      It would not matter if the finished book was not what had been promised. Books took a long time to write, and Clio was very old and no longer reliably clear in her own mind.

      Clio said irritably, ‘I bore myself. Who could possibly want to read anything about me? I wish I hadn’t agreed to this rigmarole.’

      ‘But you did agree.’

      ‘I know that. And having agreed to it, I am doing it.’ She was tart, as she often was on her lucid days. Elizabeth knew that Clio did not care for her, but she took the trouble to conceal her own reciprocal irritation.

      ‘We were talking about Blanche and Eleanor, last time I was here,’ Elizabeth prompted.

      ‘You know it all. You’ve seen all their letters, the papers. What more do you want to hear?’

      ‘Just what you remember. Only that.’

      The old woman sighed. She was almost ninety. She remembered so many things but she had forgotten more. The firm connective tissue