All My Sins Remembered. Rosie Thomas
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are really here, aren’t you?’ he asked.
For answer she held out her two hands for him to take. They were warm and quite solid. He kissed the knuckles of each one in turn.
‘I can’t believe you,’ he said delightedly. ‘You are a miracle.’
‘If I were a miracle, I wouldn’t have to go now and do the tea-trays.’ Clio would be home soon.
He was anxious immediately. ‘Will you come back again?’
‘Of course I will. When I can.’
After she had gone, Peter Dennis lay back against his pillows and slipped into an erotic reverie of the kind he had not had for two years. Love and sex had been a part of the old world, the one he had exchanged for the trenches. He was astonished to find that he could re-enter the old kingdom so easily.
And in her turn Grace might have been amused to know that Peter’s imaginings were set in an idyllic water-meadow backed by a hawthorn hedge.
When the starched nurse came in she looked sharply at her patient and then pronounced, ‘You are looking very much better, Captain Dennis.’
‘I am feeling very much better, nurse, thank you,’ Peter agreed with her.
Clio came home from school, bumping her bookbag down on the console table in the hall and sending the cards and papers piled on it whirling to the floor. ‘I’ve so much work to do. Miss Muldoon is a tyrant, a vile tyrant. I wanted to be free on Saturday, and now I shall have to plough through a thousand pages of Racine. You’re so lucky, Grace, you just don’t know.’
‘I’ll do your chores for you, if you like,’ Grace offered.
Saturday was important. It was Alice’s sixth birthday, and there would be a family party. Jake and Julius were coming home for it.
Clio’s face lightened. ‘Will you, really? If I go straight up and start on it now, I might just finish it by Friday. You are a true friend, Gracie. I’ll remember you in my will.’
Grace had been intending to confide in her. She had imagined that they would enjoy the mischief of the confusion together, playing at being one another as Eleanor and Blanche had done in the ballrooms twenty years before.
But she watched Clio unpacking her books, and said nothing. Clio could play at being Grace, of course, as easily as she could play at being Clio. There was a different, darker satisfaction in keeping the secret just for herself. Clio was preoccupied with her languages, busy and productive, while Grace had no such focus. The image of the puppeteer manipulating the strings came back to her.
There was a moment when she could have said, Something quite funny happened when I took a book in to Captain Dennis. Then the moment was gone.
‘Here I go,’ Clio sighed.
‘I’ll bring you up something to eat when I’ve done the trays.’
Clio blew her a kiss from the foot of the stairs. Grace did the extra work with an assiduity that made Nelly and Ida exchange surprised glances behind her back.
Later, when the girls were preparing for bed, Clio asked, ‘Have you met the new patient yet? Captain Dennis?’
Grace concentrated on her own reflection in the looking glass as she brushed her hair. She shook her head.
Clio was smiling, wanting to offer something, a confidence, in exchange for Grace’s earlier generosity. ‘He’s … interesting. Rather beautiful, in a way.’
‘The damaged hero, you mean? Another one.’
‘Oh, no. Not another, not at all. He is quite different.’
In the glass Grace saw that there was warm colour over Clio’s throat and cheeks, and her eyes were shining. Clio was ready to fall in love, and Grace felt the allure of responsive strings in her fingers. The temptation was too strong to resist. The chance to influence Clio’s love affair more than compensated for not having a love of her own. Grace didn’t think beyond that. For two or three days, until Alice’s birthday, she enjoyed the challenges of her complicated game.
Clio’s attention was torn between the books waiting on her desk and the turret room. For the first time in her life she experienced the thrill of neglecting what she was supposed to do and indulging in what she was not. She would wait in agony for what she judged to be the safest moment, then quietly close up her grammar and slip through the shadowy house to Peter’s door. He would look up when she came in, with a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty, and when she sat on the edge of the bed he would put his arms up around her neck and draw her down beside him.
Sometimes they would kiss; more often they would lie quite still, their mouths just touching, talking in whispers. Clio told him everything, about Jake and Julius and their childhoods, about Blanche and Eleanor and their different marriages, and Stretton and what had happened to Hugo, and about Grace.
‘Why haven’t I seen Grace yet?’ Peter asked once.
‘I think she’s piqued because I’ve claimed you for my own,’ Clio said, not pursuing the topic. She was quite happy for Grace to keep her distance.
At other times, Peter would begin to talk about the war. From the way his words came, reluctantly but inevitably, Clio understood that he could never close his mind to what he had seen and done. He tried to obliterate it, but he could not. She felt it always there, a long shadow between them.
Sometimes he would remember the men in his company, recalling their jokes and their idiosyncrasies and smiling at the memory so that he looked much younger, the boy that he must have been. Almost always, it seemed, these reminiscences ended with Peter saying, ‘He was killed, not long after that.’
‘What was it really like?’ Clio asked once, her whisper almost inaudible.
There was a silence before he answered her.
Then he said, ‘Like nothing you should ever know about.’
He turned her face between his hands, so that he could look into her eyes. It was difficult for him to focus on her face, so close to his. He could see the dark fringe of her eyelashes, the glint of reflected light in her pupils. Her breath was warm and sweet. He felt in this safe place that he was bathed in happiness, like sunshine.
‘I love you,’ he told her.
‘I love you too,’ Clio breathed.
Grace had to plan her own visits with even more care. She watched and waited, and then flitted like a shadow up the stairs and passageways that led to the turret: she had to avoid the nurses, and Eleanor on her rounds, and Nelly and Ida with their clanking hot-water jugs, and Clio herself.
The best time was the quiet middle of the afternoon, when Eleanor was resting in her bedroom and the maids had retired to sit with Cook in the kitchen. The nurses withdrew too, to what had once been the housekeeper’s parlour at the back of the house, where they could be summoned by an ancient system of brass bells if any of the patients needed them.
On the first afternoon Grace had thought of putting on one of Clio’s school tunics, but she dismissed the idea as too difficult to explain away if anyone else in the household should catch sight of her. She made do with a plain linen blouse and flannel skirt, and she plaited her hair in a long braid, like Clio’s.
‘Don’t you have to go to school? It is a weekday, isn’t it? Or have I lost count?’ Peter asked in puzzlement.
‘It’s Wednesday, all day,’ Grace laughed. ‘I’m supposed to be working at home. Preparing for examinations.’ She changed the subject quickly, not eager to be questioned too closely about which examinations.
She quickly discovered that it was easier not to talk very much at all. There were too many potential pitfalls in conversation. She stretched out beside him instead, measuring her supple length against him. And at the beginning, he was a willing participant. He was even the leader in their explorations of one another.
Peter