All My Sins Remembered. Rosie Thomas
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eggshell vulnerability of the naked skull. It was terrible to think of the bullet smashing into it, the hairsbreadth distance from the soft brain. She felt a shiver of horror travelling through her limbs. Her awareness of her own body was immediately heightened. The business of muscles and tendons and blood vessels instantly struck her as precious and miraculous, all the more so for never having been considered before.
She withdrew her arm, very carefully, aware of the infinitesimal warmth of their contact.
Peter’s head flopped back against the plump pillows. ‘I’m so damned weak.’
‘You will get strong again,’ she made herself say, with composure. She handed him the white and gold teacup. The mundane gesture was invested with importance.
There was another knock at the door, and the day nurse came in. She was a square-jawed, middle-aged woman who wore a long starched apron and a cap of starched and folded linen. She was carrying the dressings box, and a tin jug of hot water.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Hirsh. How are you, Captain Dennis? It’s time for your dressing.’
Clio knew that she was dismissed. She was disappointed, but she nodded meekly. ‘Goodbye, Captain.’
He ignored the nurse. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Will you come back tomorrow?’
Clio gave him her smile once more. ‘Of course I will.’
Only when the door had closed behind her did he lean back, ready to submit. The nurse bent over him, crackling, and began to peel the old dressing away from the weeping furrow in the side of his skull.
Nathaniel and Grace were home. Clio could hear Tabby and Alice clamouring for their father’s attention. Grace was coming swiftly up the stairs. She glanced up and saw Clio hovering at the top, as if she had a secret. ‘What is it?’ Grace called.
Clio had been thinking dazedly that here was a man, a man who was neither a brother or a cousin. She had met hardly any men except the other patients, and she knew with certainty that Peter Dennis was absolutely unlike any of those.
‘Nothing,’ Clio answered innocently.
Grace came up the stairs, and stopped on the stair level with her. ‘What’s the new patient like?’
‘Quite nice, I think.’ She went on down, with every appearance of calm, and left Grace on the landing.
It was the next afternoon, when Clio was at school, before Grace met Peter Dennis. She was making a visit to each of the patients, distributing the new books she had brought home in her basket. The turret room was the highest in the house and the last one she came to.
When she came in Peter saw her dark hair and eyes, and remembered the colour of her skin. There was a faint blur of light around her silhouette, but he knew that was a trick played by his own damaged eyesight. He smiled at her. ‘Clio? I hoped you’d come today.’
Grace saw that he moved his legs a little to one side under the white covers, in the expectation that she would sit down beside him. The intimacy of the small gesture struck her first, and then came a tide of other impressions. She saw that he was good-looking, even though his head was bandaged and partly shaven, and she felt disappointed that Clio had claimed his friendship first. She understood at once that he had eagerly mistaken her for Clio, and it was a ferment of mischief and pique and residual boredom that made her smile back and answer, ‘Of course I have come.’
As she said it she sat down on the bed, in the space his long legs had made for her. She was remembering the stories that Blanche and Eleanor used to tell of confusions at evening parties when they were girls. Her smile widened, and grew brillant.
Peter Dennis was dazzled by it.
‘It’s my job to go to the library and bring back books. You must tell me what you like to read. I’m afraid there’s only one left today.’
‘What is it?’ He had been unable to read for a long time. The print blurred and ran down the page like tears, and made pain slice through his head. But now he felt that he wanted to read again. He would have liked the volume of Tennyson that had been in his tunic pocket.
Grace held out the book. ‘It’s Zuleika Dobson.’
‘I’ve read it,’ Peter said. And then he added, ‘But I would love to read it again.’ This was Zuleika, he thought lightheadedly, sitting on his bed with a rainbow around her hair. He knew that he would happily throw himself into the river for her sake.
‘Do you know the story?’
Grace hesitated. She did not, but she had no doubt that Clio did. It would not be easy, passing herself off as her cousin. The challenge enticed her. ‘Not very well,’ she hedged.
‘Zuleika is the most beautiful girl in the world. All the young men in Oxford drown themselves in the river for love of her.’
Their eyes met.
‘How stupid of them,’ Grace said softly. ‘What a waste.’
In the moment’s silence that followed there was nothing for Peter to do but lift her hand from where it lay on the bedcover. He turned it in his own, examining the fingers, the dimples over the knuckles and the knob of bone at the wrist. It seemed extraordinary that this girl should be here, with her clean apple-scented skin and shiny hair, extraordinary that he should be here himself, in this room that smelt of lavender and fresh linen and polished oak boards. He wondered if he would wake up and find himself lying in a shell-hole, the sky over his head blackened with smoke.
He closed his eyes, then opened them again.
Grace was looking steadily at him. ‘Are you tired? Does your head hurt?’ Her voice had turned gentle.
‘No. I’m not tired.’
He lifted her hand and held the palm of it against his lips.
As if drawn by an invisible thread, Grace leant towards him. She leant closer, until her cheek rested against his head. She could feel the silky texture of his natural hair and the rougher prickle of the new growth. She rubbed her cheek, turning her head so that her mouth was against his skull, and her chest seemed to tighten and expel the breath out of her lungs in a ragged sigh.
He said, ‘Clio,’ and she was startled because she had forgotten the deception.
To exclude it once more she drew her hand back, away from his mouth, and put her own lips in its place. Peter breathed in sharply, but then when her mouth opened a little he tasted the slippery heat of her tongue. He put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her so close to him that he could feel her small breasts against his chest. He pushed his tongue between her teeth, his own mouth widening. He was thirsty, and ravenously hungry.
Grace thought, What did Clio do yesterday?
It came to her that she didn’t know her cousin nearly as well as she had thought, and then that for now she was Clio, looking out from inside her. Or controlling her from above, like a puppet. The notion was intriguing, and oddly exciting. It was more exciting than what was actually happening to her.
Grace didn’t feel frightened by Captain Dennis, not in the way that Jake had frightened her with his furtive desperation. She felt pleasantly alive, and stimulated by his kisses, without being afraid that she might not be able to control him, or understand her own response.
She knew what she felt about this. She enjoyed being kissed by the damaged hero, she liked the way that he seemed to give himself up to her, with blind concentration. She was relieved to find now the first surprise was over that she felt cool, almost detached. She reached up and stroked back his hair, away from the stark white dressing.
Had Clio done the same thing yesterday?
When Peter opened his eyes her face was momentarily shot into bright and dark fragments, prism-edged, like broken mirror-shards. He waited for the visual disturbance to subside and her features reassembled themselves. For another instant there was a complete image but it was a double one, so that he saw two of her.