- -
- 100%
- +
The boys often bathed in the summer holidays, wearing long navy-blue woollen bathing suits that buttoned on the shoulders. To their disappointment the girls were not allowed to do the same, because Blanche and Eleanor had never done so and didn’t consider it desirable for their daughters. They had to content themselves with removing their shoes and long stockings and paddling in the shallows.
‘Are the rules understood?’ Nathaniel demanded ferociously.
‘We understand,’ they answered in unison.
The keel of the dinghy ran into the sand like a spoon digging into sugar. The fisherman had gone home. The boys jumped ashore, Nathaniel lifted Clio and Grace launched herself into Jake’s arms. He staggered a little with the weight of her, and a wave ran up and licked over his shoes.
They all laughed, even Clio.
As they trudged back up to the house Grace said to Clio, ‘I must say, I think your father can be splendid sometimes.’
‘So do I,’ Clio answered with pride.
The days of the holiday slipped by, as they always did.
John Leominster was in Scotland for the shooting. Nathaniel went away to London, then came back again. Blanche and Eleanor stayed put, happy to be together, as they had been since babyhood. They wrote their letters side by side in the morning room, walked together in the afternoons, took tea with their children when they came in from the beach and listened to the news of the day, and after they had changed in the evenings they ate dinner alone together in the candlelit dining room, the food served to them by the manservant who came from Stretton for the holiday.
The children, from elsewhere in the house, could often hear the sound of their laughter. Clio and Grace listened, their admiration touched with resentment at their own exclusion. They knew that the two of them could never be so tranquil alone together, without Jake, without Julius.
For the children there were races on the beach, picnics and drives and hunts for cowrie shells, and, that year, rowing in the Mabel. The boys passed their swimming tests, and became confident oarsmen. They learnt to dive from the dinghy, shouting to each other as they balanced precariously and then launched themselves, setting the little boat wildly rocking. The girls could only watch enviously from the waterline, listening to the splashes and spluttering.
‘I could swim if they would just let me try,’ Grace muttered.
‘And so could I, easily,’ Clio affirmed. ‘Why isn’t Pappy here, so that we could at least go in the boat with them?’
They weren’t looking at each other when Grace said, ‘We should go anyway. Prove we can, and then they’ll have no reason to stop us any more, will they?’
‘I don’t think we should. Not without asking.’
Grace laughed scornfully. ‘If we ask, we’ll be told no. Don’t you know anything about older people? Anyway, Jake won’t let anything happen.’
It was always Jake they looked to. Not Hugo, even though Hugo was the eldest.
‘I’m going to go,’ Grace announced. ‘You needn’t, if you’re scared.’
‘I never said I was scared.’
They did look at each other then. The fisherman had been right, they were alike as sisters. Not identical like their mothers, the resemblance was not as close as that, but they had the same straight noses and blue-grey eyes, and the same thick, dark hair springing back from high foreheads. When they looked they seemed to see themselves in mirror fashion, and neither of them had ever quite trusted the reflection.
Grace turned away first. She lifted her arm, and waved it in a wide arc over her head. The white sleeve of her middy-blouse fluttered like a truce signal.
‘Jake,’ she called. ‘Ja-ake, Julius, come here, won’t you?’
Jake’s black head, glistening wet like a seal’s, appeared alongside the dinghy. He rested his arms on the stern, hoisting the upper half of his body out of the water. He was almost thirteen. His shoulders were beginning to broaden noticeably under the blue woollen bathing suit.
‘What?’
Hugo and Julius bobbed up alongside him. Hugo’s head looked very blond and square alongside his cousins’.
Grace’s arm signal changed to a beckoning curl. ‘Come in to shore for a minute.’
Jake began lazily kicking. Julius and then Hugo dived and swam. Under Jake’s propulsion the Mabel drifted towards the beach. Clio thought, They always do what she wants. She turned to look up the sand. The two nannies were sitting as usual on a blanket on the lee of the sea-wall. Tabitha’s perambulator stood close by. The two younger Strettons, Thomas and Phoebe, were playing in the sand. They were turning sandcastles out of seawater-rusted tin buckets. Hills the chauffeur had put up the canvas awning ready for the mothers, but they had not come down yet. They would still be attending to their volumes of correspondence. Their empty steamer chairs sat side by side, and Hugo’s red pennant flew bravely above them in the stiffening breeze.
Clio saw the fisherman a little further up the beach. He was busy with his coils of nets.
When she looked behind her again it was to see the boys plunging through the shallows in sparkling jets of spray. Mabel rocked enticingly at the end of her painter.
‘It isn’t fair,’ she heard Grace saying. ‘You have all the fun in the boat. I think you should take me out now.’
‘Us,’ Clio insisted, and Grace looked at her but said nothing. She stood characteristically with her hands on her hips, her chin pushed out. Hugo laughed and Julius began to recite Nathaniel’s rules of the sea. Jake stood and looked at Grace, smiling a little.
Grace fixed on him. ‘There are grown-up people on the beach, the nannies and the fisherman. You three have been rowing and swimming all week. What difference will there be just in having us in the boat? And once we’ve been, they won’t be able to stop us going again, will they? The rules are petty and unfair.’
‘That’s true, at least.’ Support came from Hugo, who was never anxious to accept Nathaniel’s jurisdiction.
‘But we were told,’ Julius began.
‘Stay here with Clio, then.’
The twins shook their heads, and Grace smiled once more at Jake. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun for all of us to go out together, on our own?’
He put out his hand and took hers, making a little bow. ‘Will you step this way, my lady?’
Grace bobbed a curtsey, and hopped into the dinghy as Hugo held it. Her white cotton ankles twinkled under her skirts. Clio followed her, as quickly as she could. Julius sat in the prow and Hugo and Jake took an oar each. The rowlocks creaked and the Mabel turned out to sea. The nannies were still watching the babies.
It was exhilarating out beyond the breakers. The swell ran under the ribs of the dinghy, seeming to Clio like the undulations of breath in the flank of some vast animal. The waves looked bigger out here than they had done from the shore, but Hugo and Jake pulled confidently together and the boat rode over the wave-breaths like a cork. On the beach Nanny Brodribb suddenly stood up and ran forward, with her white apron moulded against her by the wind. She was calling, but none of the children heard her or looked round.
Grace let her head fall back. Her even teeth showed in a smile of elation. The satisfaction of getting her own way together with the sharp pleasure of the boat ride and Jake bending in front of her made her eyes bright and her cheeks rosy.
‘You see?’ she murmured. The question was for Clio, wedged beside her in the stern. ‘I was right, wasn’t I?’
They rowed on, turning in an arc away from the horizon, and once again a wave caught them broadside and washed in over them. This time, instead of laughing, Clio gave a small yelp of alarm. The water seeped in her lap, wetting her legs and thighs. It was surprisingly cold.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jake told her.
‘Don’t worry,’ Grace sang. She was filled with happiness, the sense of her own strength, after being confined on the beach with the women and the babies. She saw the blue sky riffled with thin clouds and wanted to reach it. It was joy and not bravado that made her scramble up to stand on the seat with her arms spread out.
Look at me.
They did look, all of them, turning their faces up slowly, as if frozen. All except for Clio, whose eyes were fixed on Grace’s feet planted on the rocking seat beside her wet skirts. She saw the button fastenings, and the rim of wet sand clinging to the leather. A second later the dinghy pitched violently. There was a wordless cry and the shoes flew upwards.
Jake shouted hoarsely, ‘Grace.’
Clio looked then. She heard the cry cut off and the terrible splash. She wrenched her head and saw the eruption of bubbles at the stern of the Mabel. Grace was gone, swallowed up by the sea. The boat was already drifting away from the swirling bubbles. It pitched again, almost capsizing as Jake and then Hugo launched themselves into the water. The boat began to spin helplessly. The sun seemed to have gone in, the brilliant morning to have turned dark.
‘Take an oar. Steady her,’ Julius screamed.
Clio was still staring into the water. In that instant she saw Grace, rising through it. Her face under the greenish skin of the sea was a pale oval, her eyes and mouth black holes of utter terror.
‘Row,’ Julius was shouting at her.
‘I don’t know how to,’ Clio was sobbing. She stumbled forward, took up the wooden oar, warm from Jake’s hands, and pulled on it.
Grace’s head had broken the surface. She was thrashing with her arms, but no sound came out of her mouth. Then she was sinking again, and Hugo and Jake ploughed on through the swell to try to reach her.
‘Pull with me,’ Julius instructed. Clio tried to harness her gasping fear into obeying him. She stared at his white knuckles on the other oar, dipped her own and drew it into her chest. Out, and then in again.
When she looked once more, Jake and Hugo had Grace’s body between them. She was lashing out at them with the last of her strength, her staring eyes sightless, and for a long moment it seemed that all three of them would be submerged. A wave poured over them, filling Grace’s open mouth. Jake flung back his head, kicking towards the Mabel and trying to haul her dead weight with him. She hung motionless now with her head under the water.
Julius rowed, and Clio battled to keep time with him. Her teeth chattered with cold and terror and she repeated over and over in her head, Help us, God. Help us, God.
The gap narrowed between the boat and the heavy mass in the water. Hugo had his arm under Grace’s shoulders. ‘Come on,’ Julius muttered. On the beach the two nannies had run to the water’s edge. Their thin cries sounded like the seagulls. Julius saw too that the fisherman had shoved out in his much bigger boat, the one he used to row around the lobster pots. The high red-painted prow surged through the breakers.
Hugo and Julius were closer. Grace was between them, a tangled mass of hair and clothes and blanched skin.
‘Ship your oar,’ Julius ordered Clio. He leaned over the side, tilting the boat dangerously again, stretching out his arms. His hand closed in Grace’s hair. He hauled at her, feeling the terrible weight, and another wave flung the dinghy upwards so that his oar rammed up into his armpit. Hugo was choking and flailing now, and Jake’s lips were drawn back from his teeth as he gasped for breath.
‘Hold her,’ he begged Julius. In spite of the pain Julius knotted his fingers in the sodden hair, and felt the body rise as Jake put his last effort into propelling Grace towards him. Between them, they forced one dripping arm and then the other over the dinghy’s side. Julius took another handful of the back of her dress and her head rolled, pressing her streaming cheek against the blue ribs of the Mabel. Jake and Hugo could do no more than cling on to the same side. Clio leant out the other way as far as she dared.
She was dazed to realize how far out to sea they had been carried. The beach and the headland and the houses seemed to belong to another world, a safe and warm and infinitely inviting place that she had never taken notice of until now, when it had gone beyond her reach. The words started up in her head again, Please God, help us.
The red prow of the fisherman’s boat reared over Jake, Hugo and Grace. The man lifted one oar and paddled with the other, manoeuvring the heavy craft as if it was an eggshell. He leant over the side and Clio saw his dirty hands and his thick, brown forearms. He seized Grace and with one movement lifted her up and over the side of his boat, her legs twisting and bumping. The fisherman laid her gently in the bottom of his boat. The sight of the inanimate body was shocking and pitiful. Clio knew that Grace was dead. She forced her hand against her mouth, suppressing a cry.
With the same ease, the fisherman hauled Hugo and Jake in after Grace. They sank down, staring, huddled together and trembling. Their hair was plastered over their faces, fair and dark, and seawater and spittle trailed out of their blue mouths.
The man leant across and lifted the trailing bow-rope of the Mabel. He made it fast to the stern of his own boat and then lifted his oars again. The two boats rose on the crest of a wave and plunged towards the beach.
A little knot of people had gathered, watching and waiting. As soon as the red boat came within wading distance, two men splashed out and hoisted the bundle of Grace between them. They ran back and grimly spread her on the sand, rolling her on to her belly, lifting her arms above her head.
Clio let herself be lifted in her turn, and then she was set gently on her feet. She wanted to run away up the beach, away from the sea that gnawed at her heels, but there was no power in her legs. She almost fell, but someone’s hands caught at her. Part of the murmuring crowd closed around her, and then she heard the very sound of the warm world, the lovely safe world. It was the faint crackle of starch. She lifted her head and saw Nanny’s apron, and half fell against it. The scent of laundry rooms and flatirons and safety overwhelmed her, and she looked up and saw Nanny Cooper’s face. Her cheeks were wet and her eyes were bulging with fear.
The boys had been hurried ashore. Jake and Hugo were shrouded in rugs and all of them became part of a circle that had Grace at its centre. The desperate business of the men with their huge hands, who bent over her and pounded at her narrow chest, seemed in futile contrast with her stillness.
Nanny Brodribb stood beyond them, her hands pressed against her face, her mouth moving soundlessly.
They waited a long time, only a few seconds.
Then Grace’s mouth opened. A flood of watery vomit gushed out of her. She choked, and drew in a sip of air. They saw her ribs shudder under the soaked dress.
The crowd gave a collective sigh, like a blessing. They closed in on what had become Grace again, living and breathing. Julius stumbled forward and tried to kneel beside her.
‘Give her room, can’t you?’ one of the men said roughly.
They turned Grace so that she lay on her back, and her eyes opened to stare at the sky.
Clio became aware of more movement beyond the intent circle. Blanche was coming, with Eleanor and Hills the chauffeur just behind her. The strangeness of it made her lift her eyes from Grace’s heaving ribs. There was no elegant glide now. Blanche’s head was jerking, she was hatless and her ribbons and laces flew around her. Clio had never seen her mother and her aunt running. It made them seem different people, strangers.
The two women reached the edge of the crowd and it opened to admit them to where Grace lay. Blanche dropped on her knees, giving a low moan, but no one spoke. They were listening to the faint gasps of Grace’s breathing, all of them, willing the next to follow the last. Jake and Hugo stood shivering under their wrappings of blankets. Nanny Cooper moved to try to warm them, with Clio still clinging to her apron. The other nanny began to trudge up the slope of the beach to where the small children had been left under the nursemaid’s eye. Clio took her eyes off Grace once more, to watch her bowed back receding.
They were all helpless, most noticeably the mothers themselves, kneeling with the wet sand and salt water soiling their morning dresses. They looked to the fishermen for what had to be done.
Grace’s stare became less fixed. Her eyes slowly moved, to her mother’s face. She was breathing steadily now, with no throat-clenching pauses between the draughts of air. The fisherman lifted her shoulders off the sand, supporting her in his arms. Another of the men came forward with a pewter flask. He put it to her mouth and tilted a dribble of brandy between her teeth. Grace shuddered and coughed as the spirit went down.
‘She’ll do,’ one of the men said.
Another blanket materialized. Grace was lifted and wrapped in the folds of it. Blanche came out of her frozen shock. She began to cry loudly, trying to pull Grace up and into her own arms, with Eleanor holding her back.
‘All right, my lady,’ another fisherman reassured her. ‘I’ve seen enough drownings. This isn’t one, I can promise you. Your boys got to her quick enough. Not that they should have took her out there in the beginning.’
In her cocoon of blanket, Grace shook her head. Her face was as waxen as if she had really died, but she opened her mouth and spoke clearly. ‘It was my fault, you know. Not anyone else’s.’
The fisherman laughed. ‘You’re a proper little bull-beef, aren’t you? Here. Let’s get you inside in the warm. Your ma’ll want to get the doctor in to look at you, although I’d say you don’t need him any more’n I do.’
He lifted Grace up in his arms and carried her. Blanche followed, supported by Eleanor and Hills on either side, and the children trailed after them, back to the big house overlooking the sea.
As soon as she was installed in her bed, propped up on pillows after the doctor’s visit, Grace seemed too strong ever to have brushed up against her own death. For a little while afterwards the boys even nicknamed her Bull-beef.
Clio remembered it all her life not as the day Grace nearly drowned, but as the day when she became aware herself that all their lives were fragile, and temporary, and precious, rather than eternal and immutable as she had always assumed them to be. She recalled how the land had looked when they were drifting away from it in the Mabel, and now that inviting warmth seemed to touch everything she looked at. The most mundane nursery routines seemed sweet, and valuable, as if they might stop tomorrow, for ever.
There must have been some maternal edict issued that morning for everything to continue as normal, more normally than normal, to lessen the shock for all of them. So the nannies whisked the older boys into dry jerseys and knickerbockers, and made Clio change her damp and sandy clothes, and by the time they had been brushed and tidied and inspected, and had drunk hot milk in the kitchen, the doctor had been and gone without any of them seeing him, and it was time for children’s lunch. There was fish and jam roly-poly, like any ordinary day. No one ate very much, except for Hugo who chewed stolidly. Clio wanted to cry out, Stay like this. Don’t let anything change. She wanted to put her arms around them all and hold them. But she kept silent, and pushed the heaps of roly-poly into the pools of custard on her plate.
Later in the afternoon, Clio found the two nannies together in the cubbyhole where the linen was folded. There was the same scent of starch and cleanliness that had drawn her back on the beach into the safe hold of childhood, but now she saw that both of the women had been crying. She knew they were afraid they would be dismissed for letting Grace go out in the boat.
‘It isn’t fair,’ Clio said hotly. ‘You couldn’t have stopped her. I couldn’t, nobody could. Grace always does what she wants.’ Anger bubbled up in her. Nanny Cooper had been with the Hirshes since Jake was born. She came from a house in one of the little brick terraces of west Oxford. The children had often been taken to visit her ancient parents. It was unthinkable that Grace should be responsible for her being sent away.
‘Don’t you worry,’ Nanny tried to console her. But it was one of the signs of the new day that Clio didn’t believe what she said.
In the evening Nathaniel arrived off the London train, summoned back early by Eleanor.
He called the three boys singly into a stuffy little room off the hallway that nobody had yet found a use for. They came out one by one, with stiff faces, and went up to their beds. When it came to Clio’s turn to be summoned she slipped into the room and found her father sitting in an armchair with his head resting on one hand. His expression and posture was so familiar from bedtimes at home in Oxford that her awareness of the small world’s benevolent order and fears for its loss swept over her again.
Nathaniel saw her face. ‘What is it, Clio?’
She had not meant to cry, but she couldn’t help herself. ‘I don’t want to grow up,’ she said stupidly.
He held out his hand, and made her settle on his lap as she had done when she was very small. ‘You have to,’ he told her. ‘Today was the beginning of it, wasn’t it?’
‘I suppose it was,’ Clio said at length.
But she found that her father could still reassure her, as he always had. He told her that there was no question of any blame being placed on Nanny Cooper for what Grace had done. And he told her that the changes, whatever they were, would only come by slow degrees. It was just that from today she would be ready for them.
‘What about Grace?’ Clio asked. ‘Is today the first day for her, as well?’
‘I don’t know so much about Grace,’ Nathaniel said gently. ‘I hope it is.’
Clio wanted to say some more, to make sure that Nathaniel knew Grace had insisted on going out in the Mabel, and that she had just been showing off when she leapt on to the seat. She supposed it was the same beginning to grow up that made her decide it would be better to keep quiet. She kissed her father instead, rubbing her cheek against the springy black mass of his beard.
‘Goodnight,’ she said quietly. As she went upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Grace she heard Nathaniel cross the hallway to the drawing room where the sisters were sitting together, and then the door closing on the low murmur of adult conversation.
Grace was still lying propped up on her pillows. Her dark hair had been brushed and it spread out in waves around her small face. A fire had been lit in the little iron grate, and the flickering light on the ceiling brought back memories of the night nursery and baby illnesses. Clio found herself instinctively sniffing for the scent of camphorated oil.
‘What’s happening down there?’ Grace asked cheerfully.
Clio didn’t return her smile. ‘Jake and Julius and Hugo have been put on the carpet for letting you out in the boat.’
‘It can’t have been too serious,’ Grace answered. ‘Jake and Julius have just been in to say goodnight. I thanked them very prettily for saving my life. They seemed quite happy.’
‘Aren’t you at all sorry for all the trouble you caused?’
Grace regarded her. ‘There isn’t anything to be gained from sorrow. It was an accident. I’m glad I’m not dead, that’s all.’ She stretched her arms lazily in her white nightgown. ‘I’m not ready to die. Nothing’s even begun yet.’
Clio didn’t try to say any more. She undressed in silence, and when she lay down she turned away from Grace and folded the sheet over her own head.
In the night, Grace dreamt that she was in the water again. The black weight of it poured over her, filling her lungs and choking the life out of her. When she opened her eyes she could see tiny faces hanging in the light, a long way over her head, and she knew that she was already dead and lying in the ground. She woke up, soaked in her own sweat and with a scream of terror rising in her throat. But she didn’t give voice to the scream. She wouldn’t wake Clio, or Nanny who was asleep in the room next door. Instead she held her pillow in her arms and bit down into it to maintain her silence. She kicked off the covers that constricted her, too much like the horrible weight of water, and lay until she shivered with the cold air drying the sweat on her skin.