Her Victory

1

Clara began with her mother, whose maiden name was Moss, and first name Rachel. She was born in 1860, and her father was a tea merchant who had settled in London from Hamburg thirty years before. By intelligence and toil he became well-to-do. A birth certificate in the first box was leaved between yellowing paper headed by a stark engraving of warehouse and offices. The engraving for the export house was of a clipper in full sail and, small as the letter-head was, a child had put tiny men on the mast tops with coloured pencils.

Rachel was the middle daughter of three, and the mother had died after the birth of the third child. ‘I am big, gawky, with scarlet flamy hair and with freckles like sparks, and I do not like myself,’ she had written in a school exercise book. There was a small painting taken at some time from its frame which, though as unclear as if seen through a window beaded with moisture, showed her hair to be plentiful and auburn, as firmly tied by a band as her spirit seemed to be held behind her unhappy eyes and shapely sensitive mouth. She had a high clear forehead, and the only freckles visible on the cracked portrait appeared to be on the wrist which rested on her knees.

A clutch of pages had been torn from her leather-bound diary. The spine was worn away, and the ink brown where it had been black: ‘The one I am to marry is an honourable man. He is good and pleasant, but I don’t love him. The rabbi who spoke to me about it is an honourable man. My father, whom I love, is an honourable man. They are all honourable. But they are all men. What can I do, being alone as I am? I shall ask questions at Passover, but they won’t hear what is in my voice. Miss Silver, who talked to me for so long about free will, denies now that she did, and says I ought to marry whomsoever my father wishes, and that I am lucky a husband has been found for me, and that I am to be taken care of, and that she wished she had a husband and children instead of having to teach for her miserable living etc. But I will not marry Benjamin Green, whether or not he is the rabbi’s nephew, because I saw him while walking from Schule with Miss Silver last Sabbath, and he saw me, and I know that he followed us down Edgware Road as far as the Park, as he knew I wished him to do. I hoped he would follow me forever, and that I would walk until Miss Silver could keep her pace no longer, when I was on my own and still walking, and then I would turn and he would be there, and with no one else but the two of us we could meet and talk, just as one day we shall be together always.’

The script varied, as if the ink were from another bottle, or because of an indifferent nib and a nervous style of writing: ‘I spoke to him. We were shopping and I saw him on Oxford Street. He saw me, and stayed in one place, and I deliberately avoided Miss Silver. I took his hand and we walked up a court. His name is Percy Phillips, and to me it doesn’t matter that he is not one of us. God is not blind when He looks on people, and must see that we are all the same.

‘“Why me?” he said.

‘“Because I have chosen you,” I told him.

‘He said he had loved me since he first saw me but couldn’t understand why I should love him. I said that I did, and that he was mine, and wasn’t that enough? Far more than any elegant sufficiency, he said with a smile. We were together for half an hour. Poor people were begging while we were talking, but they were shadows, because I was happy. “I will pass here next week,” I said, “and we can meet.” He nodded, and told me that he worked in his father’s office in the City, from which the family property was managed, and that with so much work he might not be able to come. I said he must, and he agreed that he would. “You must also see me on Saturday evening,” I said, “whether we speak or not.” He said that, providing the family didn’t go to their house on the Kent coast, which they did on occasional weekends, he would do so. I maintained that it would be a better plan if, when we next saw each other, we walked away together. I would never go back to my home. My life there had finished, so why not let our shared existence begin? I could not remain where it was abhorrent to me, nor stay away from where it would be heaven to be.’

A different handwriting, on smaller paper, seemed to be part of a letter. ‘… wrong, because my son tells me he wants to marry your daughter. I realize, as I am sure you also do, that because she is a Jewess, and as we are Christians, this is quite out of the question.

‘There is nothing further to be said about it. I would not want to be an obstacle to anyone’s happiness under normal circumstances, but nothing in this case promises the possibility of any progress towards bringing them together. It would be understandable to me that you do not want your daughter to become a Christian, and therefore you must see that it is quite unthinkable to me that my son should enter your Faith, even if that were possible.

‘This situation must be explained to them, and I shall certainly do my part in the matter, so that it shall not be allowed to get out of our control. You must see, my dear sir, that there is a danger of this, though I emphasize however, and I am sure you will agree, that the status of our families is such that were it not for the matter of Religion there would be no obstacle against the young people being joined in Holy Matrimony. How it began is beyond …’

‘She did not,’ Clara commented in her journal, ‘fail to notice the gist of James Phillips’ letter. All she had to do was become a Christian. There was no other way. Any self-respecting Jew – and all Jews are self-respecting, perhaps because they are more than usually God-fearing, so I understand – would be dismayed at her action. There was a lot of talk at that time of converting the Hebrews to Christianity, and many societies were formed to make the attempt. I’ve often wondered why, but I suppose there must have been some feeling among the more sincerely religious English that the only real Christians could be Jews, and that if numbers of Jews became Christians then the Christian religion might begin to appear more Christian than it seemed to be at the time. So the Phillipses would have been happy enough to make things easy for Rachel to become one of them. Their son Percy was an only child, and loving him as they did, and fearing for him as I understand one does for an only son, they did all they could to make him happy.

‘But father was never happy. No one could have made him so, though mother gave him more happiness than most. The very fact that he must use all his faculties, and fight every inch of the way to get to know her, kept him spiritually awake right up to the time of her death. With someone of his own sort, whoever that might have been, but whom he might more easily have understood both by heredity and upbringing, he would have quickly become dull and slothful. By continually making the effort to understand her – and at the end he was close enough – he stayed alive. Married to anyone else, his first attempt at suicide would have been his last. I’m convinced of it.

‘Rachel was only a lukewarm Christian, and so was he, come to that, though they believed in the same God. No form of worship would have been able to cure his melancholia. He would sit for days in his study as if fixed to the huge mahogany desk, moving only to light a cigarette, or to turn the page of a book or newspaper whose print his eyes couldn’t fix on sufficiently to read a single word.

‘At five or six years of age I remember trying to look through the keyhole, or pushing the door further and further open, and waiting for him to waken because mother had said that he wasn’t like other people because he could sleep while sitting at his desk. I stood there with Emma one day, who was a year younger, but after a few minutes she began to shake at the sight of our unmoving father, and wept in terror. “He’s dead, Clara! Look! He’s dead! Why doesn’t he go to heaven?”’

He moved neither head nor hands, though Clara knew he must have heard, as she pulled Emma away. He was awake, but paralysed. When he wasn’t, he went to his office, sometimes every day for weeks. He would walk in the garden and cut roses. There were occasions when nobody knew where he had gone. He would come home dirty and tired, carrying a picture, or flowers, or presents for the children. Then they would see neither their mother nor their father for days, going quietly to bed at night after spending their evenings in the kitchen with the cook. Clara told Emma that she would never marry. Emma said she wouldn’t, either. ‘Nor shall I,’ John said. ‘I’m going to be an engineer, and engineers go to foreign places, so they can’t be married.’

‘But they get eaten by crocodiles,’ Emma reminded him.

‘Not me,’ John said. ‘I shall have a gun, never fear!’

Sometimes their father would go to hospital for a few weeks, and Rachel told them that because he went to sleep at his desk they had to take him away in order to wake him up. People went to hospital either to die or get better, and he went there to get better. An account book gave his income for 1895 as eight thousand pounds, and Clara had kept bills and receipts to prove that he had always gone to the best places.

A photograph showed him at Broadstairs after coming out of the convalescent home. On his own at the time, he had arranged for a local photographer to take the picture in the open air. His hands rested on a silver-headed stick, and he was looking towards the water. Forty years old, he was wearing a derby hat and an overcoat, and rimless spectacles. His thin lips curved down with settled apprehension, and his eyes seemed to be looking at the vision of an eternally receding mountain range whose heights he knew he would not be able to scale. Nor would his thoughts catch up with those fragments of his mind that always eluded him. His faculties at times were clear and active, but there was part of himself that he could never find, and the effort to do so occasionally became too much. Clara thought it was this vacancy in his powers of perception that Rachel had sensed at their first chance passing in the street. Something was missing that yet belonged to him, and she thought that by searching, and firmly tying down whatever it was, she could thereby give it back to him whole, an action that would produce a lifelong stability of soul between them.

Perhaps in more lucid moments he had seen that something similar needed to be done for her. However it was, they sought each other’s soul all their lives, and didn’t give up even at the darkest hours. Because they did not entirely find in each other that which they knew to exist, though at times they were closer to it than anyone incapable of making the effort, they never stopped being in love. ‘Your mother,’ Percy said to Clara after he had become a widower, ‘was from a devoted race,’ implying that she had given everything to him, as he at his best moments had tried to give all that was good in himself to her.

A photograph taken in the garden showed Rachel as a grave-looking women with a high forehead and an abundance of hair. Clara was fifteen, her sister Emma fourteen, and their brother John sixteen. Emma had at this time the same tormented eyes as her father, and a distortion of the mouth which was due as much to having moved as because she was horrified at being fixed for ever at this time with people to whom, she said afterwards to Clara, she did not feel she belonged. But her eyes stayed still and were perfectly caught, vainly trying to grasp a vision that would not come to her. In physique she was slight like her father, but grew taller in the next few years. Her look suggested that she had already experienced much suffering, and would spend the rest of her life trying to forget the ordeal. ‘She had seen none at all,’ Clara commented, ‘though what she appeared to feel might have been a preview of what had yet to happen.’

The cardboard boxes devoted to John were marked NOT TO BE OPENED – EVER! But traces of broken sealing wax showed that they had been examined more than once by Clara. There were school reports, textbooks, letters sent home, a picture postcard from Cromer (‘seashells good, weather bad’) as well as a cloth cycling map marking a tour through Belgium, on which each night-stop was shown in such heavy pencil that the name of the place was almost obliterated.

Letters from the trip were tied up with a Baedeker guidebook that was falling to pieces. After Ostend, on the way out, John stayed the night at Dixmude: ‘A level run of nearly thirty kilometres along a poor road of paving stones which can’t be much good for my old bone-shaker. We passed many dairy farms – Lord, how many! It rained some of the way, but my cape kept most of it off. Arthur had a puncture near a village called Keyem, and I think all the children of Belgium watched him mend it. They thought it a great lark when we knocked on a door and asked for a bowl of water to find the hole.

‘We got a room at the Hotel de Dixmude (unpretending, but good enough for us), had a wash, then went into the church, and inspected the fine rood-loft my tutor told us about, as well as an Adoration of the Magi by Jordaens. Tomorrow, we go on to Ypres, then east to Menin, Courtrai and Audenarde and, Oh dear, I don’t know how many places yet, but I don’t doubt, and neither do you, dear mother and father (and Clara and Emma, as well as that horrid little dog), that there will be a letter from each benighted spot.

‘I’m sore from the saddle, though am told such an affliction will pass with time and wear, but in all other ways it is wonderful being awheel in flat-as-a-pancake Flanders. I understand that the Ardennes area is hilly! I shall have to stop being silly! All we hope is that the weather stays dry.

‘Arthur sits on his bed playing the flute, and if he doesn’t pipe-down soon I shall throw my pillow at him, and they have very big ones in Belgium. So that you don’t know of our fight, dear parents, I will close this fond epistle from the almost benighted bicycle-pilgrims!’

Every letter saved, every hotel bill, steamer and railway ticket from John’s holidays, as well as engineering notebooks, drawings and profiles, plans and layouts, and estimates for schemes and bridges. All packed away and hoarded, and for what? Paper well-written on, in a small neat hand as if even a margin would be so much square-inchage of waste. A clever, fun-loving, patriotic uncle dead fifty years before his time, and never known.

Another box was set aside for the war that had to come. John was a soldier at university, and later with the Territorial Force. Photographs showed him at summer camp, and it was easy to pick out the young man with dark curly hair and a handsome hawkish face in his middle twenties. A bushy moustache in later photographs made his face somewhat longer and fiercer. Other snapshots showed him laughing when caught trying to pull down a tent tope, or when a friend was preparing to take the jump at leapfrog. Happy days while they were playing, and Clara noted that it was such a pity that reality caught up with them.

During one of his leaves he stood with a sister on either side, premature regret shaping their set mouths, while John was smiling as if, under the circumstances, nothing less would do. In another photograph, next to a horned gramophone, he sat with a small white dog on his knee. There were scores of letters, neatly tied together, as well as badges and buttons in a cloth bag closed by a drawstring. A dozen damp-stained diaries and notebooks were filled with the same fine hand, except that much of the script was in pencil, and had come back from France:

‘I am sitting on a stool in a deep dugout with thirty feet of solid chalk and sandy clay above my head. I feel very safe. I am living with three of my fellow-officers in a place eight feet by twelve. It has been fine all day, and our guns have not ceased pounding. The day for our big attack has been a long time coming, but the whole army is as confident as can be, and will go over the parapet keen as mustard to get into contact with the enemy. Our men know they are his master in all but barbarous acts.

‘It is now Monday, and has been a great day. I was interrupted all night long with messages, and so got little sleep. I was up at five-fifteen, and at Brigade HQ at 5.27. At Zero Hour – 5.30 – for our operation, every gun we had opened fire and continued hard as could be until we gained our final objective. It began to rain as soon as the battle started, but stopped about 8.30. Later in the day it snowed, but cleared again. While our casualties have not been light they have not been nearly as heavy as at the Somme. Our men behaved wonderfully well, and I am quite proud of my sappers and officers. They carried things along marvellously, and obtained good results.

‘Thursday: Shells were passing over our heads when I was out with my orderly. A wind blew towards us from where the shells were landing and exploding. Suddenly we were both half smothered. We hurried forward to get out of the cloud, but soon were complaining of sore throats and chests from the gas. We should have rested, but went on over the battlefield. The padres were first and foremost. I thought one of them was an Artillery Officer, as he was helping to guide a gun over a soft bit of ground. Large parties were out collecting the dead, and when they got a certain number together, service would be read. The padres are responsible for the proper burial, and for the collection of all papers belonging to the dead. Just as it was growing dark I passed the burial party again still at their work, and I wondered how much longer they would stay. The ground we won looks so hopeless. So many wasted lives. Corpses all around. One of the enemy’s support trenches was strewn with dead men from end to end. The fire from our artillery was so effective, and with such a preponderance of it, that a man behind our barrage could not easily escape death or such awful wounds as I have ever seen. I picked up the latest pattern rifle and some rounds from one of these dead Germans, and hope I shall be able to bring it home on my next leave. There are so many stories that I want to tell, but none of my real thoughts about what happens here can be put into words. I sometimes feel they never will be. Artillery is louder than all speech. When it is close and continuous even the shape of people’s lips is distorted, and they stay calm, though the eyes tell another tale. When the barrage is still I have so much work to do, or I am too numb to think …

‘The thing I abhor more than all else in this war, after the actual loss of life, is that the dead are allowed to lie out in the open, uncovered and uncared for in so many cases. We see in and about our trenches hordes of ponderous rats. I am not sure what species, but they are certainly carnivorous. There is nothing the men out here loathe more than seeing their lumbering bodies dragging along, knowing they have fattened off their dead comrades, and may well fatten off them if ever the time comes. Numerous rat holes are seen over every grave, and our greatest delight is the destruction of these rodents who, by and large, are the only victors of these battles. And children think that Ratty in The Wind in the Willows is a lovable character! What a time he would have had out here! But we shall beat the Hun. We shall go on to the end, and certainly defeat him at his own game of soldiering.’

There was a pile of plain buff-coloured Army Books 152, their pages of squared paper, in which were written factual day-to-day diaries telling what time he got up and went to bed, and what the weather was like. Tom had space in his room to set the notebooks on a shelf for further reading.

When everything had been dragged clear from the cluttered boxroom he discovered a shallow cupboard built into the wall. A zinc lock held the latch in place, but he gripped hard and twisted it from the wood. Inside were measuring tapes, photographic enlargement equipment, a tripod, an engineering level, a miner’s compass, a clinometer and some longish thing wrapped in a tarpaulin sheet which he carried to the living-room. The knot had been hammered into a compact ball, but he pressed and squeezed till the individual strands worked free.

‘I don’t know whether I learned in the orphanage that you never cut string,’ Tom said, ‘or in the Navy, but it’s another old habit that dies hard.’

Maybe it’s part of his nature, Pam thought, to waste nothing, and to let no job daunt him. ‘Makes no difference,’ she said, ‘as long as you get it undone.’

She took a basket from the kitchen and went out, leaving him bemused with his clues and time-schemes, stooping among heaps of ephemera from which he tried to make sense.

Going up a narrow street from the sea, rain drove against her mackintosh. For half the way, till wind blew it clear, a stench of mothballs enveloped her, because the coat came from the hall cupboard and had not been worn for months. Water filled the gutters, and a car splashed her almost to the waist. She stepped across the street to the shops. He needed feeding. Such delving and sifting ate at him from the inside, and made his face thin.

She walked on, a zig-zag course towards the station. The wider road exposed her, icy rain flurrying when she turned towards the seafront. She would never find the flat. She would knock at a door, and someone whom she hadn’t seen before would answer. She would wander around town for the rest of her life wearing Clara’s mackintosh and with a bag of shopping on her arm.

‘Come in,’ he said.

‘The weather’s foul.’ She took the mackintosh into the bathroom and hung it to dry.

He had a rifle in his grease-smeared hands. ‘I was going to come with an umbrella and meet you, but couldn’t be sure of the direction.’

‘I was all right. I didn’t get wet. Where did that come from?’

His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and she noticed a tattoo on his muscular forearm, a fearsome dragon twisted around the words ‘Death or Glory’. Such things decorating men’s bodies made them look like woad-painted people from the Stone Age.

‘Youthful indiscretion,’ he laughed. ‘Done in a drunken moment, if I remember. And I only just do!’

‘I meant the gun.’

He held it high. ‘John must have brought it back – a genuine German rifle from the Arras battlefield. There are a dozen rounds as well. I’ll stow it where it came from. No good to us.’

‘Didn’t do him much good, either.’ She set her basket on the floor. A circular bronze plaque several inches in diameter lay on the piano top. Britannia with trident, and wreath held forth, were accompanied by a lion, surrounded by HE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR, and the name JOHN CHARLES PHILLIPS in a rectangle above the lion’s head. She put it down quickly, as if it were still alive with grief and loss. The first of two telegrams said: ‘I regret to inform War Office reports Capt. J. C. Phillips died of wounds April 26th.’ The second contained words of solace: ‘The King and Queen deeply regret the loss you and the army have sustained by the death of your son in the service of his country. Their majesties truly sympathize with you in your sorrow.’

‘That’s how it was done.’ He put the rifle away. ‘Their son, and my uncle, may well have taught me a thing or two.’

‘Perhaps if he had lived,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t have been packed off to the orphanage.’

2

Clara said: ‘It was too much to bear. No man was ever more destroyed by the death of his son.’ It must have been the same for all fathers, and worse perhaps for all mothers. The ranks of a family would be torn into by such a death as if a cannon ball had gone through, and they would not close for years.

Percy went to the recruiting office to enlist. He was nearly sixty. Too old. He offered money if they would take him. He wanted to go to France and die, or to get his revenge for John’s death. ‘He went day after day, and mother couldn’t stop him. She was too grieved to try. Father was utterly broken down. One of the sergeants brought him home, and mother thanked him with half a crown for beer. The same sergeant accompanied him a few days later, but refused another half crown.

‘Mother showed me a letter,’ Clara said, ‘that she would send to the War Graves Commission. John’s grave should not be marked with a cross, because he was Jewish. He must be buried under the Hebrew sign, no matter what religion he gave when he enlisted. Though he had not lived as a Jew he was nonetheless one by the Law, as were all children, she insisted, born of a Jewish mother. Father was apathetic, but when he saw the letter he commented that though John had been brought up as a Christian, Rachel was quite right. And what did it matter, since both Jews and Christians believed in the same God? As far as he was concerned they were one people.’

The reply said that in spite of the case being an unusual one it was quite possible and perhaps even proper for his grave to be marked as that of a Member of the Jewish Faith, but that since his records showed him not to be one, it would be necessary to have the authority of a rabbi before her wishes as Captain Phillips’ mother could be carried out. Rachel went from one synagogue to another until she obtained what she wanted from a rabbi who had known her father. Emma went with her, and the rabbi who gave his consent said that she was Jewish too, and ought not to forget it when the time came for her to choose a husband and have children.

‘We went to see John’s grave after the war. Going through the customs at Boulogne was a tedious business. The French officials were very thorough, and there was a long queue, but we patiently put up with it. Father had by this time sufficiently recovered to motor us to Arras, though the roads were still bad and many villages in ruins. Lodgings were scarce, and Emma and I shared a bed at the Hotel de L’Univers.

‘The French people were everywhere sympathetic, though Emma said she smelt nothing but death, and wished she had not come. Father enjoyed the travelling, seeming to forget his troubles and constrictions as we drove along the cobbled roads admiring the scenery. But Emma and I wept at seeing him and mother clinging to each other at the cemetery. At the same time father seemed younger than for many years because, as he said, he felt closer to John than when in England. We took a camera, and there is a photograph of the rabbi-padre standing between father and mother, with Emma and me behind. We were at the grave marked by John’s name and the Star of David. The Englishman in charge of the cemetery was much taken with Emma, and pressed her hand a little too hard and long, she said, when we left.’

Percy later sent fifty pounds to the rabbi ‘to be distributed, as he thought fit, among charities which would in some way benefit his co-religionists’. Percy had always given to good causes, believing that those organizations for assisting the poor and the lower classes should be amply supported by the more fortunate, who ought to give as much as they could so that it would not be necessary for the state to help – which Percy would see as the beginning of universal corruption and degradation.

Each year he took a notebook and a list from his desk and, without a secretary, stayed at home to perform the charitable duty of sending cheques to asylums, hospitals, medical colleges, missionary societies, fishermen’s funds, lifeboat institutions, and soldiers’ homes. There were receipts for money he had sent to an organization for ‘Promoting Christianity Among the Jews’ and another for ‘Assisting Jews to Return to the Promised Land’ and Clara wondered how much their mother was aware of this, knowing it was probable that Percy never told her.

He had a life-subscription of two votes to an infant asylum for orphans close to London, to which he sent extra money when an appeal was made, or when his conscience urged him – as it sometimes did on recovering from one of his nervous attacks. He visited the orphanage twice a year because, he said, it did his heart good to see children being treated well who were, after all, those beings on whom the future of the British Empire depended.

‘Father said that Emma was much like mother had been when young. She had the same reddish hair, as well as a fine figure that turned every man’s head. Even women stopped to look at her. Her wit could be scorching, and her humour also had a bite to beware of. Her eyes were not good for any distance, and she tried to do without glasses, though on the visit to John’s grave near Arras she wore them all the time, frameless half-lenses which, hardly visible until you were quite close, gave an attractive and mysterious glitter to her face.

‘At the restaurant in the evening we were a typical English family making a visit to a dear one’s grave, as many parties did in those years. We were also, Emma said, enjoying the good food. Father’s pepper-grey hair was brushed straight back, and he wore a dark suit, with a high collar and tie, and a watch at his waistcoat. He smiled faintly at Emma and me when we talked about the events of the day in such a way that the people round about thought we were more carefree than we ought to be.

‘Father’s illness had improved in the last few years, Emma observed, because what attacks he now had were called grief, and that was something in which he was not alone in those days during and after the Great War.’

Rachel wore a high-necked black velvet dress, and a locket around her neck which held her dead son’s photograph. Under it, seen only when she leaned, was a six-pointed golden Star of David. Mostly she sat straight, and it was invisible. Her hair, pulled back and tied, was more ashen than red. To the daughters’ amusement and occasional embarrassment Percy would reach across and hold Rachel’s hand tenderly for a few moments. She told him not to be silly, though Clara knew that without such gestures she would wither and die. She spoke very little since John’s death, and none of us, said Clara, not even father, knew what she was thinking. Her pride was her strength, but her belief in God gave her both pride and strength. Which came first was impossible to say. God was her rock, and she turned into the rock on which the family leaned, though at a cost of denying her basic element which was that of speech. She could not take such weight and yet allow her heart to speak. The tragedy had worn her almost to silence. Speech was painful because her heart could no longer support her gaiety of spirit, and so she became sparing of words, an uncharacteristic state, but one which allowed her to go on living as their mainstay. She thought that because she had broken her father’s heart by marrying out of the Faith John had been taken away from her, but Emma said in that case what had the millions of others been punished for?

There was nothing to prove that if she had not fallen in love with Percy and run away from home she would have suffered any the less. Life was tribulation, whoever you were, and whichever way you looked at it, but what she had endured from her husband, and again by losing her son, at last forced her to wonder why she had been so mindlessly in thrall as to have broken connection with her family. She regretted nothing, but speculated on what had driven her to pursue something which, set far beyond Percy’s love of her and hers of him, seemed to have vanished in the ashes of life.

The folly of a childish and burning will had, on first seeing her future husband, sent her on a course that was endless. She fell in love with the expression on his face, sensing a vision of the future which, while not clear in its details, drew her even more strongly, a vision of his illness, and perhaps beyond that an intimation of the death of their son. She had been blind to this disaster and suffering that waited in the future, as everyone was, but a hint of it was there, and she knew it, and drove herself even more blindly to the actuality which would never let her go. She had been in the grip of a will so profound and valid as to make her commit the terrible sin of abandoning her family, so that when her parents died she could not go their funeral.

Yet even at this age, after all that had happened in her life, she knew she was the same daughter, except that she lived as if afraid to tread down hard on the soil under her feet for fear she would go on falling for ever.

In order to soothe her pain she lit a candle in a small brass holder every Friday night at the dinner table, which glowed by her side until the meal was over. On striking the match she said a phrase in the clearest Hebrew, and Clara remarked in her diary that while this took place the others remained silent. Rachel said to her daughters: ‘This is for John, for you two, for all of us, and for all Jews. We always lit the candle at home.’

She sat at the table of the hotel-restaurant in Arras with a husband who never ceased to say that he adored her, and she smiled and returned the pressure of his fingers over her wrist knowing that each morning she could wake up and thank God that she at least had the blessing of two beautiful daughters. On such a thought she lifted her glass of wine to drink.

Percy lit a cigar, and ordered coffee, and looked at his ‘Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front’ to decide where they would go in the morning. The girls smoked cigarettes. ‘It’s bad for your health,’ Rachel told them every time. ‘You should be careful with your health’ – which caused them to recall the constant phrase to men friends: ‘For God’s sake, do be careful! If you aren’t, it’ll be bad for my health!’

But their mother wasn’t to know such details about their lives. Not that Clara had been in love with any of the men. Well, not much, at any rate, though it had been the thing to do with one or two who were special, before they went to France or some such place. The only man she’d really loved was John, and still did, and wept silently at night, knowing he would not be in the house when they woke up in the morning. Now that he was dead she loved Emma, who was eerily like her mother and didn’t object any more to being told so. Yet it often seemed to Clara that John hadn’t been her brother, nor was Emma her sister, otherwise how could she love them so passionately, and at times with such misery in her heart?

3

Tom emptied a whole box which contained items devoted to the motoring tour in northern France: boat tickets, hotel accounts, petrol bills, maps and plans, pamphlets from the Syndicats d’Initiative, photographs and postcards, and bank receipts on money exchanged, as well as the Blue Guide and a diary kept jointly by Clara, and Emma his mother. They travelled towards the Channel along part of the route cycled by John twelve years before, with the intention of staying at Dixmude, but the place was still in ruins so they went on to Ostend, putting up at the Grand Hotel to eat oysters.

In the morning Percy could not get out of bed. Or he would not. He was ill. From what? He said to Rachel that he did not care to leave the Continent, that he could not bear to go back, and wanted to return to Arras and be close to John’s grave till he too died.

Rachel said that she also would like to do such a thing, but what was the use? What God gives, He takes away. She held his hand, wiped his tears, kissed him, and steadied a cup so that he could drink tea. She comforted him, but he wept and would not move. He was ill. But there were no symptoms – no headache, palpitations, vomiting, diarrhoea or sweats. Talk of getting a doctor enraged him. Nevertheless, he was ill, because he would not get out of bed.

The girls pleaded. They had to be back in London because there were people to see, dates to keep, shows to go to. When they suggested getting on the boat by themselves, Rachel’s face stiffened in an anger they had never seen. They must wait until their father was well, when they would go home together. Emma said she wanted to leave now, and didn’t see why they both shouldn’t. Or they could all get on the boat, even father, and have the motoring club bring the car back.

Rachel’s voice came close to a shout. ‘We’ve come here as a family, and we will go back the same way, as soon as your father’s better.’

Moody and subdued, the sisters wanted something to happen but didn’t know what. They walked around the town till, in half an hour, they decided that they had ‘done it’ and there was nothing more to see. They sat in a café, passing and repassing the diary to each other. ‘You write about this place,’ Clara said. ‘I wrote all that rubbish about the last one.’

‘And a fat lot you wrote, after all,’ Emma said. ‘Only two lines.’

‘Two and a half,’ Clara said. ‘I say, don’t look now, but look at that fat old man over there.’

‘What fat old man?’ asked Emma.

‘I said don’t look now,’ Clara snapped. ‘But look! He’s looking at us. I’m sure you could do a whole page on him.’

‘You do it, then,’ Emma suggested.

‘It’s you he’s looking at,’ Clara pouted.

‘I’m bored,’ Emma said.

‘You’re lazy.’

Emma scribbled several lines, then rested the pencil across the coffee-cup saucer.

‘Dirty old devil!’ Clara said loudly. ‘Just look at him.’

‘Oh do leave him be,’ said Emma. ‘He’s only reading the paper.’

‘He’s not. He’s fiddling with himself. He really is. Would you believe it? And it’s an English newspaper he’s reading. He must be from Birmingham – or Bradford! It really is too much.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll call the manager.’

‘Oh don’t, please.’ Emma knew her to be capable of it. ‘He’s not doing anything at all. Stop joking.’

‘Well,’ Clara said, ‘I’m bored as well. Damn this life. I want some fun.’

They rented a hut on the beach, and swam in the sea, but the breakers were grey and cold, and sent them shivering back up the sand. At a hotel dance they met two officers on leave from the Rhine, and did not get to their own beds till two in the morning.

Rachel said, with a lift of her eyebrows, that they seemed to be taking very good care of themselves.

‘If we can’t,’ Clara said, ‘who can?’

Percy stayed in bed for three days. He was ill, and they weren’t allowed to doubt it. From the window Rachel could see boats leaving for Dover. Waves erupted against the groynes. She played cards with him, and at such times he was cheerful and competent. But after a game or two he would throw the cards off the bed, and begin weeping again. He was ill, he said. Why did she look at him as if he was not? No one believed him. The world was a black glove, and he was inside it.

Rachel looked away. How could a face change so quickly – and what was the reason? – from being fairly normal to one streaked and shivering with an agony she couldn’t bear to look at? She felt like the young girl she had been when his first attack came on soon after they were married. Now he had something to grieve for, and so had she, but her feeling of shock and pity was the same as it had been then. His despair was so intense that her own wracking sorrow had no chance of expressing itself. He was ill, and it was easy to see that his spirit was fixed in such fear and torment that he was beyond help – though she would never admit it.

She calmed him by reading in English from the Hebrew Bible she carried, comforting him by intoning in her beautiful voice verses from Job or the Psalms. He held her hand, and adored her, and became still. He thanked God for sending her, for only through her did the darkness recede, and the black glove relax its grip. When he was finally calm she fought to stop her own tears breaking forth, something which his illness never allowed.

He got out of bed, and they stayed three more days so that he could recover before going home. Rachel sent the girls back as they wished, and she and Percy were alone. They held hands when standing on the beach, and while shopping, and made love in the afternoon and at night. They drove up the coast into Holland for a distant view of Flushing on the opposite shore that was pinned down by sunbeams from the troubled sky.

4

The kitchen was clean enough, Pam thought, but not really clean. Wanting a rest from two hours of reading, she went up the ladder with a damp rag soaked in detergent, and rubbed a circle of cleanliness the size of a large coin that might be taken for a dab of fresh plaster whose whiteness had not yet merged. Then she rubbed until the paint under the grease became as large as the memorial plaque sent by the King and his grateful people to John’s parents.

An attempt at proper cleanliness would mean enlarging the pristine area to take up the whole room. She looked from the ladder and saw dust everywhere. Closer to the ceiling there were cobwebs and spiders’ nests. The floor had been swept but not washed. It was tidy but not clean, calling for days of work.

Everything clean was not quite clean. Lace curtains wanted washing, and the water would darken when they were dipped. Folded tea towels needed a visit to the laundrette, and cutlery could do with a rinse and a polish. Heavier curtains in the living-room should go to the cleaners. The pelmets and woodwork ought to be washed down. Everywhere called for dusting, sweeping and scrubbing.

Was life worth throwing away on such labour every week, month, year? You took one breath only in order to draw another, and laboured from birth till no more breath would come. Everything you did in life was useless, except that it kept death at bay and allowed you to live with as much ease as could be managed. Cleanliness was comfort if you had been brought up that way – though it’s no business of mine who cleans the flat, she thought, coming down the ladder and putting buckets and rags away. He’ll have to get someone else for the job.

She read again for half an hour, then peeled potatoes and put them into boiling water, laid lamb chops under the grill, and cleaned lettuce. While he carried, searched, sorted, pondered and evaluated the long undisturbed hoard she walked in and out of the dining-room, setting the table and putting down a first course. The immersion in a different life pattern, as well as the long time since breakfast, made her stomach turn with hunger like a swimmer coming up for air. The corkscrew was difficult to pull. ‘I took a bottle of Mersault from the fridge.’

He opened it.

‘You look as if you’ve just done the nightshift in a soot factory,’ she said.

He washed, then sat diagonally from her. With rolled-up sleeves, and a shirt open at the neck, it seemed as if he had lived in the flat all his bachelor days. Even his subdued and worried state emphasized the fact. ‘You must have had an interesting hour or two.’

He paused in his eating. ‘I’ll tell you about it.’

‘Take your time.’

‘I still don’t know who I am, but I’m getting a rough idea as to who I might have been, and that’s a beginning.’

She put more of the fish on his plate. ‘Have you found anything startling?’

‘Not yet. I’m not even born.’

‘Keep trying,’ she said. ‘Knowledge is sacred.’

His eyes were troubled. ‘This sort is.’

She was glad he had changed his mind about it, though he was further away than she liked. She served hot food, then set cakes and cheeses close so as not to get up till after the meal. ‘You can make the coffee.’

He poured more wine. ‘I’ll wash up, too.’

‘No. Get on with your sorting.’ If she wasn’t useful she wouldn’t be here. The day out had turned into something else. London seemed a thousand miles off. Her past had vanished. No alteration of surroundings had ever lifted her so much out of herself. Even to wonder what was missing from her consciousness did not put her back in touch. The man whose flat she was in was a stranger, as she no doubt was a stranger to him, so they were at ease with each other. At least she hoped she was. She felt almost married, but without the tangled obsessions that came from having slept in the same bed. She liked being here because she could leave whenever she wanted to.

He told her what he had found, describing how each piece of information was laid aside until something turned up from a box to confirm or complement it. He assembled truths and situations into sequences, like doing a jigsaw puzzle or putting a pack of cards in order during a game of patience. He did not go rigidly from A to B, and hurriedly to Z as if afraid to lose his way should he not finish the story quickly, or as if he couldn’t be bothered to make the tale good for her since it only concerned him, or good for himself since it couldn’t concern anyone else; but he went on calmly with his circumlocutionary report, taking a fact here, a lead there, describing a book, or a photograph, and quoting from a letter or journal, or an unlabelled sheet of paper on which someone had scribbled thoughts seemingly unrelated or information presumably unsought, and circling the loose pieces until a more or less whole picture formed, the assembling of a mosaic rather than an ordinary account which would have been finished too quickly and thereby diminished in the telling for him, and been less absorbing in the hearing of it for her.

‘I have to be careful not to allow the stuff to explain more about myself than it deserves,’ he said, having spoken in his precise way to the end of the meal. ‘I’m still me, after all, and my fifty years of unknowing haven’t been exactly meaningless.’

He was fighting his definitions to the last. She wanted to pity him because, though he might not know it, his face reflected a painful ordeal. He would never admit it, she felt sure, yet she did not envy him the ability to hold it in check, or his fate that had decided he must.

They went into the kitchen, and when the noise of the coffee grinder stopped, he said: ‘The same things happen to everyone. It’s only when you find out about such events that they seem more fascinating than they should. I read somewhere that everyone’s more like their grandparents than their parents, and now I’m not sure whether to believe it. You just have to live with what you know, I suppose, or let all revelations slip into the bloodstream, and then more or less forget them.’

She was no longer sleepy. ‘You’re only half-way through the story.’

Unopened boxes lay over the living-room floor like the jellyfish surrounding the ship off Sabang on that tropical morning when he had almost fainted and dropped overboard. Would they sting if he stepped on them? There was no option but to descend. The box nearest his chair released a smell of stale lavender, a vanishing sweetness that he recognized but could not fix in his memory.

There was the usual jumble of liner and railway tickets, whist-drive score cards, sweepstake certificates, death notices, address books, pocket diaries and dance programmes. He filled plastic bags for the dustbin men, not being a detective on the lookout for information who needed evidence to condemn or acquit. The past now seemed relevant enough to tie himself firmly to it. He had been an orphan, but it hadn’t mattered. Aunt Clara had told sufficient for him to think it unimportant to know more. If he had persisted, he was given to understand he would lose even her. She would tell him not to come back. ‘That’s all I know,’ she had snapped at him, ‘so ask me nothing else.’

‘Damn it,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ll scratch among the rubbish till my fingernails bleed.’

5

‘What memories I shall be left with when all this is over!’ Clara wrote in her large script. It was open, and naïve, and the rounded generosity of individual letters stared at him like faces that pleaded to be believed. But he shook off all impressions, imagining that to attempt to read the character of writing in this way would argue even more naïvety in him.

‘I knew the cruise would not end well as soon as I saw the name of the ship. But to think I didn’t really know what was going on. How could I have been so BLOODY stupid? Yet even so I couldn’t have stopped it. Nobody could. We were together every minute. No one came into our cabin. When she was there, I was with her. But of course I couldn’t have been. At night she was on her own. Mother blamed me. Father blamed Emma. Emma blamed herself. And we all blamed THE MAN. But Emma was twenty-eight, and in control of her own decisions. Or was she? Whoever is? She saw him for the first time on the third day out, when we’d recovered from our mal de mer, and there was nothing anybody could do from that moment on. But why didn’t she make him take care? Elementary precautions had always been rule number one, the first thought before enjoyment, such as it was or could ever be.’

Emma’s carefree ways did not prevent her from understanding the world well enough to try and snap its bonds, but she did more damage to herself than break free of the values which she looked on with contempt. But she was in love with Alec, a sort of scullion or undercook who should not have been within a mile of the first-class part of the ship, but who was the kind of beetle it was impossible to prevent encroaching.

Clara saw them standing on the lifeboat deck one night after dinner, and almost pulled her from the rail. ‘We must have coffee, dear.’

He looked at Clara. ‘She’ll be all right with me.’

‘Perhaps so. But she’s coming into the saloon now.’

He was even cheeky about it. ‘I was showing her the stars. There’s a few around tonight.’

‘I dare say there are.’

‘What a fuss you’re making,’ Emma said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. I’m not a young girl.’

‘I know, dear, but it’s father’s birthday tomorrow, and we have to write that telegram between us so that we can send it off.’

‘Goodbye, miss.’ The man walked away.

Emma said to Clara in the saloon: ‘Don’t do that again, do you hear? I talk to whoever I like. He’s a pleasant person, and we were just talking.’

‘With his arm around you?’

Emma’s fits of temper never lasted long. ‘It’s your dirty mind. His arm was nowhere near me.’

‘I’m not blind.’

‘I wish you were. But if you come up to me like that again and make me look such a fool I’ll jump overboard.’

‘You wouldn’t!’

‘I bloody well would.’

Clara laughed. ‘What fun!’

‘You think so?’

‘The ship would stop, and we’d throw you lifebelts. A jolly bosun would haul you aboard, and take you to the captain’s cabin.’

Everyone wondered why they were laughing.

‘I’d be clapped in irons,’ Emma screamed, ‘for the rest of the voyage.’

‘First-class irons, though,’ Clara shrieked. ‘Or maybe they’d put you in charge of that Chief Dragon Stewardess in the white overall, and the Lord knows what she’d do with you!’

‘Oh, shudder-shudder,’ Emma moaned. ‘I’d much rather have my little cock-o’-the-walk cook.’

‘Stop it. You must promise never to see him again, not someone like him. There are lots of men on board who don’t seem to be attached, so why do you have to get mixed up with a bad egg like that?’

‘Oh shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let’s forget it. It’s absolutely nothing, you know.’

Clara thought that the fuss had indeed got out of hand. ‘If it’s so unimportant why can’t you say you’ll never see him again?’

‘Well, I can say it, but I may bump into him walking around the deck.’

‘He shouldn’t be where we can see him,’ Clara said. ‘I’ll complain to the captain.’

Emma turned pale. ‘He’ll lose his job.’

‘He’ll be clapped in irons. Or be made to walk the plank,’ Clara went on, ‘from the top of the funnel.’

Emma wanted no more of her humour. ‘Don’t do any such thing.’

‘Promise, then?’

Clara waited. Emma nodded. ‘But if I don’t see him again, I’ll never forgive you. It’s rotten of you to make all this fuss, just because you’re having your period.’

A tall thin middle-aged man with a row of medal ribbons on his lapel passed their table. He turned his face away quickly, and walked out of the door to get some fresh air.

‘You’re awful!’ Clara said.

Emma became despondent. ‘He must have heard such things before, and if he hasn’t, what a poor fish!’

When two people want to be together, nothing can be done to stop them meeting. ‘We fell in love,’ Emma said, on telling Clara that she was pregnant. Emma couldn’t be guarded every minute of the day and night. At the cinema one evening Emma complained, before the main film began, that the place was stuffy and made her feel sick because the ship was rocking. She would go to her cabin and rest.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Clara offered.

She pressed her sister’s hand and moved along the row. ‘No, don’t. I’ll be all right. I just want to lie down.’

‘And you haven’t seen him since leaving the ship?’

‘No.’

Clara snorted. ‘And you call that love?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re talking like a mill girl who’s been reading Red Letter magazine.’

‘I don’t care. It was marvellous.’

Clara had seen him standing on the quayside helping to unload while they were waiting to go ashore at Southampton. He was a pallid ginger-haired man of medium height, though too far away for her to see much else. He probably had a wife and children, the squalid little runt. On every voyage he had fun with someone or other. How dare he wave at us?

‘You must have an …’ Clara daren’t say the word.

‘It’s too late,’ Emma told her. ‘I never would, anyway. I want it to be like this. Life was getting too empty for me.’

‘I can’t think what it will do to father and mother. It will kill them.’

‘Do you know,’ Emma said, ‘I don’t care. Well, I do, but it’s my life, and my baby – not theirs. I have to choose my own way out, and nobody else’s. I can’t be doing what other people want from me all the time.’

‘Father and mother aren’t other people.’

‘But they will be if they turn against me for a thing like this.’ Emma peered closer and saw her sister’s tears, wondering why Clara seemed to think that she had committed an act of treachery against her personally. Such sister-love must come to an end sooner or later. Let it go. She couldn’t bear Clara’s overweening concern, nor her parents’, which was really their concern for themselves and not for her. Yet it was the only love they had, and would never diminish.

‘We love you more than we love ourselves,’ Clara told her.

‘Please leave me alone.’

‘Of course, it won’t kill them. Silly of me to say that. Times have changed. You can always have it adopted, or something.’

Emma spoke firmly. ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’

‘Is everything I say wrong?’ Clara was alarmed at the fact that it might well be.

‘I’ve made up my mind to go to Cambridge.’ Emma sat wearily on the bed. ‘I can live there with friends till I get a flat or house of my own. Mother and father needn’t know what’s happened till the baby is born. I refuse to let anybody ruin my life.’

Clara was beginning to wonder whether their lives hadn’t been smashed before they were born, but knew she must stay with her sister in the hope that she could at least prevent her destroying another one – or two. ‘Just tell me what I can do to help.’

‘Stay with me,’ Emma said. ‘If I sleep alone tonight I shall never wake up.’

6

The taxi-cab to Liverpool Street was laden with trunks and cases. Emma took three pound notes from her purse to pay the train fares, and got thirteen-and-fourpence change. Their luggage went before them on a porter’s barrow. Emma read Strand Magazine as the train steamed lustily out of London. She seemed, while rain washed down the windows, as if she had nothing in the whole wide world to worry about.

In the booking hall at Cambridge she confessed that she knew no one there, and couldn’t think why she had suggested coming except that they had been at Newnham. For all she cared, they could just as well turn round and go back home. She didn’t want to, however, because nobody could go back, no matter where that magical locality might be. She didn’t wish to run anywhere else, either, so supposed she ought to kill herself, and certainly would if she weren’t pregnant, and if she were on her own.

Her face was so dry, eyes so laden with self-reproach that Clara thought even tears would be a blessing. A fit, like a thunderstorm, would clear the air, at least for a while. She felt there was a barrier in Emma’s perceptions that held back notions of self-preservation. Such mending thoughts were not sufficiently plain to her. It was torment. Clara found irresponsibility the worst of sins. Emma’s apprehensions were merely somewhat distant, though being faintly sensed by her did not mean that she was mistaken as to their presence. The fact that she perceived them at all increased her trouble – and Clara did not know whether Emma would rather that they had not been there. As it was, they only sent enough indication of menace to confuse her decisions.

Their sisterly connection was firm – always had been – almost as if they were twins. Clara was appalled at the situation, but knew she must make an effort. Rain teemed outside. It would be better to do anything rather than nothing, so she telephoned the University Arms, asking for their best double room and bath for herself and her sister.

She swung jauntily out of the telephone box. ‘Come on, my love, cheer up. I’ve got us a big cosy bolt-hole looking over Parkers Piece. We’ll have a long soak in the tub, then go down for a ten-bob dinner.’ She called: ‘Hey, porter, get us a taxi.’ Turning again to Emma: ‘We’ll leave our trunks in the left-luggage, then talk about what we’re going to do when we get to our den. Or we won’t, if we don’t feel like it. We’ll do just as we like!’

They had their cases, and then tea, sent to the room. Emma sat on the bed. ‘I’m not unhappy. Don’t think that. I just don’t care. It’s wonderful. I’ve always wanted not to care, and to have something to care about that I won’t care about, and now I don’t!’

Clara passed the plate of cucumber sandwiches, glad to see her eat. She could hardly do anything else. ‘But I care for you. I sometimes think I’ve never cared about anyone else.’ It was true that she hadn’t, but Emma seemed to be in some strange land of her own, so it was no use pushing the point. She looked older than she need have, with shadows under the eyes, and even powder and rouge couldn’t hide the fact that her skin had gone past its first bloom without either of them noticing. Her eyes were large and feverish, as if straining to see more than would ever be possible.

Beauty had gone to her body. The slope from full breasts expanded over her belly when she stood by the bathroom mirror, and faced Clara who was unable to resist spreading her fingers over the warm navel. ‘Has it moved yet?’

‘Last night it did. I thought it was a squirrel. Or a hedgehog. Then I woke up and remembered I was pregnant. I was glad.’

Clara put the plug in and opened both taps, thinking: If only she would miscarry, and things could go on as before. But the notion showed such horror on her face that Emma gripped her arm. ‘For God’s sake, what’s the matter?’

‘Damn! It must be indigestion from those candlefat cakes. I had a pain right here, and it was no baby moving, let me tell you. Maybe I’ll go for a walk while you have a nap. Shall you be all right?’

Emma got into the bath, and tapped her stomach. ‘I can’t run very far with this.’

Clara laughed, and agreed. ‘Wash your back?’

She sat on the stool and rubbed the sponge up and down, thinking how normal she looked from behind.

‘I can tell what you’re thinking,’ Emma said, ‘when you do it like that. It’s too regular. Go round and round a bit. Are you thinking how wicked and stupid I am?’

She had been. ‘Nothing of the kind. It’s just so steamy in here. Perhaps I need a nap as well. Who wants to walk in the pouring rain?’

‘You know what I was thinking?’

‘How could I?’

Emma turned. ‘I was thinking that sex is awful. I wouldn’t care if I never saw another man, and I certainly can’t imagine ever going to bed with one, even when I feel passionate. Does that mean I’m going to have a boy?’

‘You’re going to have something.’ Clara held the large bath towel for her to step against. ‘Let’s have you out. It’s nap time for you. You look a bit worn out.’

She stood. ‘You are funny when you nanny me!’

Clara disliked such flippancy. ‘I’m certainly not funny to myself.’

‘Who do you think I take after?’ Emma asked.

She was wary. ‘How do you mean?’

The dressing-gown made her seem less overwhelming. ‘Favour. Am I like mother, or father?’

They went into the bedroom. Clara passed a hairbrush. ‘You feature mother, I suppose.’

‘And you have father’s looks, mostly.’ Emma lay back on the bed. ‘John was a mixture of both.’

Clara moved bottles and tubs of make-up around the dressing-table as if playing a game of chess. ‘Why did you ask?’

‘Because mother is Jewish.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘So am I – that’s what.’

‘She’s my mother as well, but I’m not Jewish.’

‘Jewish mothers have Jewish children, but if you don’t think you are, then I suppose you aren’t.’

Clara lit a cigarette. ‘John didn’t think he was.’

‘Maybe he did. But he is now, though, because mother made him be.’

‘He didn’t have any say in the matter. Why do you have to be anything?’

Emma stroked her stomach. ‘This one will have to be, I’m sure.’

‘What makes you think so?’

She lay on her side and stared at the wall. ‘Whenever I’ve been at a party and there have been Jewish people who haven’t known who I was they all assumed I was Jewish. I didn’t mind, of course. I even felt flattered. One or two who thought I was Jewish imagined I didn’t care to say so for very mean or frightened reasons. They were wrong, of course. I was too uncertain. I’d never actually been told – except by the rabbi, when mother went to see him about John’s grave.’ She turned to Clara: ‘You’re Jewish too, but it wouldn’t happen to you.’

Clara grunted. ‘I’d clout anyone who assumed I was anything. It’s none of their damned business, whoever they are.’

‘So if people,’ said Emma, ‘especially if they aren’t Jewish, are going to assume the same thing about my son – if it is a son – I shall want him to know what he is.’

‘You have been thinking,’ Clara said lightly.

‘I have to, because I’m afraid. The older I get the more frightened I become, I don’t know why. It’s worse now that I’m pregnant.’

‘You’re supposed to go all calm, so I hear.’

‘It’s not happened to me,’ Emma said, as if she hoped it never would. ‘Maybe it’s too early, and I won’t turn into a vegetable till later. Don’t think it wouldn’t have been the same though if I’d had a man fussing all over me, because it would.’

Clara slumped in the easy chair, as if to escape from the rays of her sister’s anger. Emma’s moods came from a defensiveness which threatened to crush everything else in her. There was no call for it, but then, there was no need of anything that spoiled the trust between people. The last twenty-four hours had worn Clara out, while Emma seemed far from devastated by her trouble, though she went so up and down that it was hard to say what was happening to her. ‘I wish you hadn’t told that lie about friends in Cambridge. I could have thought of better places to hole up in than this pile of rain washed scholarship.’

She leaned on one elbow. ‘I did know someone, but when I got here I realized they wouldn’t do at all.’

‘Who is it?’ Clara asked.

‘Do you remember Jane Gusie and her husband Frank? We used to call them The Geese because they honked and quacked instead of talked.’

Clara sat upright to stop her laughter. ‘No! Not the Honks! Of course I remember them. Perhaps we will call. They might know of furnished rooms we could take for a few months.’

‘A day at a time is all I can accept,’ Emma said. ‘If I start thinking about the future I get the willies.’

Clara threw her lit cigarette into the lavatory pan, then knelt by the bed and held Emma’s hand. ‘I’ll take care of you. You have nothing to worry about.’ Each sobbing lurch of her shoulders brought out more tears.

‘Don’t cry,’ Emma felt as if she would weep too. ‘I hate it when you cry. Stop it, please.’ But she laughed instead. ‘Or you’ll sink the room!’

7

The place was cluttered. Such rubbish, Clara said, taking as much as possible to the attics before having their trunks brought from the station. They put the painted gnomes and well-ironed doilies into cardboard boxes, together with seaside knick-knacks, pot dogs, horse brasses and toby jugs from stands, shelves and whatnots. ‘I’m bound to knock them flying if they stay where they are,’ Clara added. ‘A lot of such priceless gewgaw stuff has often gone down under an absent-minded wave of my clumsy arm!’

The furnished house was in a street off Parkers Piece and cost five pounds a week. An elderly couple had gone to New Zealand for six months to stay with their sons – or perhaps for a year, the estate agent told Clara. ‘We’ll let you know in good time.’

The aspidistras from front and rear windows went into the garden shed, and two oleographs of Admiral Beatty were wrapped in copies of the Daily Mail and pushed under a sofa. ‘I’d like to strip off that ghastly wallpaper and whitewash the place, but I don’t suppose they’d like it one bit. And we’d lose our twenty pounds deposit.’

‘We must get a maid as soon as we can,’ Emma said. ‘I hate making fires. And we ought to let mother know where we are. She’ll be shocked at what we’ve done, after thinking we were only here on visits.’

Clara thought not. ‘She’s used to us. As long as we’re sound in wind and limb, she won’t mind.’

‘She will,’ Emma said.

Rachel received their letter with the morning post. At three o’clock in the afternoon she knocked at the door. ‘You know, this is the first time you’ve left home, and you didn’t even tell anyone. Your father has to be in the City today, or he would have come with me. He isn’t pleased, and neither am I. You did all this in secret. Why didn’t you tell us? You can do as you wish, I know, but you might at least have told us, so that we could have talked about it.’

‘Your coat’s wet,’ said Emma. ‘Let me hang it up, then you can sit down.’

Clara, not knowing how they would tell Rachel their reason for being here, went into the kitchen to make tea. Their lives had changed utterly. A few months ago the rest of the world hadn’t existed except as a place in which to find entertainment, but now it was there only to threaten them. She could not understand why it must seem as if something dreadful had happened. They were young, comfortably off, and healthy. But Emma had struck a blow to change their lives, and Clara wondered why she had acted in such an unnecessarily perverse way. The wickedest thought, which said what a pity Emma couldn’t lose the baby so that they could go back to being their old carefree selves, had again to be pushed out of her mind.

Emma rocked in a chair by the fire, and Rachel looked at her. ‘You’re pregnant.’

‘Yes.’

‘I knew there was more to it than changing houses. Your father also said: “I wonder what it is? Something is surely wrong.”’

‘Why is it wrong, mother?’

She sat on a straight-backed chair at the table, instead of comfortably by the fire, and lifted her hand as if to push the devil away. ‘Why is it wrong? she says. Why is it wrong?’ She turned as if semicircled by an audience, a hand to her heart. ‘Is it so hard to know what’s wrong and what’s right?’

Clara came in with the tray. ‘I see she told you.’

‘Told me? She’s like a barrel – or will be soon. I knew as soon as I came in the door. She disguised it at home, but doesn’t care to here – though I had my suspicions. Why wasn’t I told weeks ago?’

‘We were afraid,’ Clara admitted.

‘Afraid? I hope you never have anything more to be afraid of than that.’ She was troubled, and angry. ‘There’s no telephone here. I must talk to your father, poor man. He’ll be worried till he hears from me, but I can’t think how upset he’ll be when he listens to what I have to say.’

Clara set out cakes and poured tea. ‘The nearest telephone is at the station. But must you tell him?’

‘When did it happen? No, I don’t care to know. But who’s the father? Where is he, at least?’

Emma was silent.

‘Well, he certainly isn’t here, and that’s not a good sign. It’s terrible to think about. We had great hopes for you two after dear John died – may he rest in peace. We thought you would find husbands who’d make you happy.’

Clara was forced to say: ‘There aren’t so many men now, mother.’

‘There are for girls like you.’ Clara thought the tears on her cheeks came more at the mention of John than because of Emma. ‘You wouldn’t even have to try.’

‘Mother,’ Emma said, ‘please don’t go on like this. It’s my life. I don’t care what father says when he knows. I’m not dying, and he’s not going to be hurt. It isn’t the worst thing in the world.’

Clara shovelled coal from the scuttle and slid it on to the fire. The fumes of soot were bad for her skin. At home they had central heating fuelled by coke from the cellar. She hoped Emma would say nothing, and let their mother talk, for there was little to be gained by making her more unhappy than she was, and perhaps reminding her of what she had been as a young woman. But Emma would not stop, and Clara was to see how those who were most alike knew best how to make each other suffer.

‘I fell in love. It sounds stupid, but what else can I say?’

‘And did he?’

Emma smiled. ‘We enjoyed ourselves. It was as if we had only a week to live. If I spend the rest of my life paying for it, I won’t mind. He stayed every night in my cabin, after Clara and I had said goodnight.’

Clara would have felt that she too had been betrayed, had she not considered Emma’s frankness as self-indulgent boasting designed to hurt herself more than anyone else. ‘What a swine he was for not taking care!’

The same bright smile lit her eyes. ‘I wouldn’t let him. I wanted everything, and he did as I told him.’ She leaned forward. ‘It was beautiful.’

The world could fall to pieces, and she wouldn’t care, adding what a pity it was that she had come away with Clara instead of by herself. She had her own money, and when the baby was born she would bring it up without anyone’s interference. Later she would get some kind of job, because she couldn’t be idle all her life. Alec had said everyone ought to work, whether or not they had money.

Rachel straightened. ‘Alec?’

‘And do you know what he was? A pastrycook who did the fancy trimmings for our jaded tastebuds! If it’s of any interest he was also Jewish. Maybe that’s why I fell for him. He was very handsome, and kind, and we parted friends. But we agreed never to see each other again. He wanted to meet me, of course, but I insisted that we mustn’t. In any case, he was married and had children. It would have been too ugly and squalid. He took it very well, though not too well, thank goodness. Luckily I didn’t know how hard it would be, though I still wouldn’t have done it any other way.’

The clatter of Rachel’s falling cup stopped her. Clara went to the kitchen for a cloth. ‘You make me so clumsy,’ Rachel said. Now that Emma had stopped telling her story there was a veil of childish misery on her face. Rachel looked at herself thirty-five years younger, and the reflection of the mirror shook as if Emma was going to cry at last. When she didn’t Rachel said: ‘We must find him.’

‘You want to make him pay?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ her mother shouted.

‘It’s no crime, so leave me alone. I know my mind, and that’s what I want. If it’s a boy, I shall have him circumcised.’

‘It’s the fashion nowadays,’ Rachel said sharply. ‘Ever since the Royal Family had it done, I suppose.’

‘I’ll get a rabbi to do it.’

‘A schochan,’ she was informed.

‘Whoever it is. You never told me.’

‘You never asked,’ her mother said. ‘But what a shame. What a terrible shame it is.’

She above all knew there was nothing to be done. The ticking of the clock told her. That’s what came of giving girls an income as soon as they were twenty-one, and letting them do whatever they wanted. The war had been a disaster in every way, because as well as getting killed and maimed, young people had learned to have their own way.

Clara poked the fire, and a bank of hot coal dropped to a lower level, scattering ash into the grate. She believed that any situation, no matter how tragic, could be cleared up without fuss and bother if everyone had a mind to it. Yet she didn’t know what to do or say.

Rachel reached for her gloves. ‘I must talk to your father.’

‘It’ll only upset him,’ Emma said. ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘It upsets me even to think about it,’ Clara put in.

‘You’re soft,’ Rachel told her scornfully. ‘You always were.’

Clara winced.

‘I discuss everything with your father.’

‘Whether he likes it or not, I suppose,’ said Clara.

‘I’m telling you not to tell him,’ Emma said.

‘You don’t tell me anything. When’s the baby expected?’

‘I don’t know! Oh, in four months, I think. I saw a doctor in South Kensington. He was tall, elderly and handsome. Ugh! Horrible! Shan’t see him again. I’d like not to see anybody, but I suppose I’ll have to. If only I were on an uninhabited island, and could have it all on my own. I’d feed him on coconut milk!’

‘You’ve been reading too many novels.’ Rachel stood, and sighed. ‘I must go. There’s a train in half an hour.’

‘It’s too wet to go out,’ Clara said. ‘Why don’t you stay tonight, and travel back in the morning?’

‘You think rain is a misfortune? I wish that was all I had to grieve about.’ She wouldn’t change her mind, so Clara helped her on with the unfashionable pre-war coat. ‘If you really must go, I’ll walk with you to the station.’

‘Stay and look after your sister. I know my way.’

‘No, I’ll come with you.’

Rachel turned from the door. ‘Do as you are told.’

Clara stepped back as if about to be hit, as if a cliff were behind her and she would fall into oblivion. She clutched the mantelshelf, knowing that her mother’s anger was only directed at her because she was afraid to tackle Emma – who hoped they would both go and leave her in peace.

Clara sat down when the door closed. ‘Well, we’ve yet to hear father’s wrath on the matter.’

‘They can’t kill me. Nor this.’ She stood up to clear the tea things away. ‘They do want to kill me, I know, but I only need to get away from them.’

‘You’re certainly going the right way about it,’ Clara told her.

8

They bought material for a maternity dress. After lunch Emma spread it on the table, and as they were puzzling over the pattern the letterbox flap rattled.

Clara came back. ‘It’s from father. I know his hand.’

Emma told her to read it.

‘Are you sure?’

She glanced at the envelope. ‘It’s addressed to both of us: a pretty cheap trick.’

‘I know. But it begins: “Dear Emma”, so it’s only to you.’

‘Read it, though, because I shan’t.’

‘This is what it says, then. Oh dear! “Mother informed me of your disaster as soon as she arrived. It’s not for me to judge. There are too many judges in the world trying to take God’s place. What has happened is something nobody could have controlled, least of all you. Some things are sent to try us, while other events occur expressly to ruin our lives. You have despoiled your life, and I can only pity you, though I have more compassion for your mother because after John’s death this is the one thing she should have been spared. There is much in you that must have known exactly what you were doing, and I am sure you measured the consequences to such a nicety that any sympathy for your plight from me or anybody else would be totally misplaced. It is not in my heart to bear this, but neither is it in my mind to pronounce you dead. You are a fully grown woman, and must face the consequences, which in any case you are quite capable of doing. You have your own income and are provided for, and therefore I can only say without any feelings of regret or injustice that it would be best if we never met again.”’

Clara put the letter down.

‘Is that all?’ Emma asked.

‘Isn’t it enough?’

‘It’s what I expected,’ Emma sighed, ‘and half hoped for. I like his style, but not his awful cheek.’

‘Are you going to answer?’

‘Burn it – to ashes.’

‘I’d like to keep it.’

‘Do what the hell you like. As long as I never see it again, and you never mention it. Come on, let’s get this bloody sugar-bag cut out. I might as well look the part of the fallen woman. There’s really not much left to do but enjoy it.’

She had fallen, Clara realized, from such a height that she wasn’t yet aware of having landed. She hadn’t, and would she ever? Try as she might to get through to her, Emma stayed obstinately and resolutely alone. And the more Clara tried the more distance she felt between them. It was best to stay calm, not make the attempt, and help when the time came. Emma had to be guarded, rather than looked after. The thought haunted Clara that, coming back from shopping one day, she would find her gone. She would go into the living-room and not see her sitting at the table sewing or reading or staring at the wall. Only an echo would answer when she called her name. But Emma was always in some part of the house.

‘What are you thinking?’ Clara asked after breakfast.

‘I don’t think any more. Nothing so crude as that. Nothing so grand, either. I just sit and feel this tadpole kick and grow inside me. We’re like husband and wife, contemplating the absolutely empty future together. I’m filled, among other things, with dread for this poor thing coming into the world. I keep seeing those thousands of graves we passed on our little trip of homage to visit dear John, and I think: “Will this bloke inside me, if it is a bloke, end up known only unto God?” Oh, I’ve got a lot to think about, if you can call it thinking. I think of mother’s romantic beginning with father, and of how they must now see my escapade. It would have been bad enough if I’d done the same, but I’ve actually gone one better, so I can see how they must hate me. I really have spoiled their lives. But I don’t think, exactly. Things only go through my mind in such a way as to reassure me that I still have one.’

Clara tried to be jovial. ‘He’ll be all right. There’ll be two of us to look after him. It’ll be great fun.’

‘I hope so. But I wish I could get it over with.’

Clara heard a noise at the front door and went into the hall. After their father’s letter she hadn’t expected to see her mother again. Rachel shook her head at their surprise, and sat down with them at the table. ‘He has his opinions, and I have mine. Whenever I feel like coming to visit you, I’ll catch the train. That’s what they were invented for.’

‘We were just off to the picture palace,’ Clara said. ‘Emma gets so bored.’

‘Don’t let me prevent you. I’ll be happy to sit on my own. I can read or sew. You should buy a gramophone and listen to music. The mood was so sudden to come and see you both that I didn’t have time to send a telegram.’

They took off their coats.

‘I left two trunks at the station,’ Rachel said, ‘not knowing whether you would be in. They’re full of things which will be needed for the baby, if it’s to be dressed in anything good.’ She stood up to take off her hat by the mirror. ‘It’s a pity you can’t find a nice young man for a husband.’

‘I don’t think there are many, even in Cambridge,’ Emma said, ‘who would want to marry a woman in this all too obvious state, though I suppose I could go out on the street and try. “Excuse me, kind sir” – and I’d do a very nice curtsy – “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but if you aren’t poxed-up from the war, or have a false leg, or an eye missing, or a toe gone, I wonder if by any chance you can see your way to marrying me some time in the next few days? I have a thousand pounds a year at my disposal, so you shouldn’t have too many regrets.”’

When they stopped laughing Rachel said: ‘You’ll take life seriously one day, I promise. I don’t know what we did to make you so foul-mouthed and wicked.’

‘You’re not responsible,’ Emma told her, ‘nor is father. I suppose I got into this mess because I didn’t know anything about myself. At the moment I’m nothing. When I go for a walk I feel I’m like everybody I pass on the street, and can’t wait to get back here so that I can be on my own, and feel like nothing and nobody, and then again like myself, whatever that is. Maybe I’ll know a bit more when this thing comes out. Did you know yourself any better, mother, after you’d had three children?’

Clara was disturbed, and only doubted that Emma spoke such rigmarole when her mother replied: ‘It was after you were grown-up that I began to know who I was.’

‘The last few months must have taught you something,’ Emma said. ‘It has me.’

‘I know,’ Rachel retorted. ‘It’s taught you how to quarrel. And how to insult your parents.’

By her silence Emma knew that she was pressing against all their wounds. ‘I’m sorry, mother.’

‘I think you should be.’

Clara felt pain for them both, and stood up, saying brightly to Emma: ‘Why don’t you start keeping your journal again? It might help you to sort things out in your mind. I write mine, as and when I can. It keeps me in touch with myself – or what’s left of me these days.’

‘I prefer to be on my own,’ Emma said. ‘When people are with me, I’m even more alone, so I don’t mind either of you being here. If I kept a journal I might get to think I was somebody else, and I should hate that, even though I don’t know who I am most of the time. Only this in here knows who I am, but by the time he’s old enough to tell me I won’t be anywhere where I can hear what he’s got to say. And he wouldn’t know by then, in any case. One minute I feel I’m going to live a hundred years, and the next it seems I’ll be lucky to get beyond this one. I don’t care, really. During the war the world was crowded with happy people who only wanted a good time. Now, it’s full of ghosts. Something happened, and I don’t suppose any of us knows what it was. Perhaps even having a baby won’t make much difference to me. If so I don’t know what will happen.’

Rachel went home after three days because, she said, she needed a rest. Clara, left behind, was swept with anguish as she looked at her sister, and heard her, in an ordinary enough voice, say things which filled her with either sorrow or horror. Emma’s lips were set firm when she stopped talking. The glow in her eyes, suggesting a far-seeing vision, was due only to short-sightedness.

9

Clara came back from the post office, took off her raincoat and galoshes in the hall, and coo-eed to let Emma know she had returned. With a fire burning, the parlour could not be cosier, but Emma was neither there nor in the kitchen. Clara shouted upstairs, and the maid told her she hadn’t seen Emma for an hour.

She put her galoshes back on, and took a dry coat from the hall stand, but did not know which way to go. Sleet blew into her face, so she walked with its main force behind, to open ground beyond Park Side. Someone was cycling, but there were no pedestrians. Protected by houses from the worst of the weather, she made her way to Christ’s Piece. They had often gone over Butts Green and Midsummer Common to the river, a pleasant stroll with the minimum of buildings hemming them in. But she kept as much towards houses as possible, and peered across spaces in case Emma was there.

It was muddy by the river and the boathouses. Her nose ran water and her neck was cold. Every step made her doubt that she was going in the right direction, but not to make for somewhere seemed too painful to be borne.

Her instinct was to get back into the warm house, but the knowledge that she must fight against it drove her on. You did what you had absolutely no wish to do far more easily than what you would quite enjoy doing – a reflection which made her momentarily stalwart against the elements, and would comfort her as long as the thought of Emma and her general predicament didn’t force itself too close to her powers of strength and decision – thought the dreadful situation could only be absent for a few precious seconds at a time during her surge through the rain.

The green river lapped at its banks. An old man on the other side pottered at some job on a boathouse roof, but then came down his ladder to take shelter, squeezing his hands together as if to get the wet out of them. She called, and asked if he had seen a woman walking alone.

He laughed. ‘No, I ain’t. Not even a dog, come to that.’

She felt an ache in her chest as if someone had punched her. Chimney smoke and mist hung over the houses. The wind had dropped and rain came directly down. Crossing Sun Street, she was nearly struck by a horse-and-cart, the driver too surprised to shout back when she called him a fool for not looking where he was going.

She went up and down every street, then crossed each at right angles, imagining Emma as quite close in front, but always turning a corner before she could be seen. She considered walking across Parkers Piece to the railway station, then stood by the kerb wondering whether she shouldn’t get into the comfort of the house and stop allowing Emma to make both their lives miserable. It was impossible to be still. From the edge of the space she saw someone a few hundred yards away, where the walks intersected at the middle.

The never-ending distance passed by putting one foot in front of the other, and keeping on with head down and eyes fixed at the soaking turf, as if afraid that should she look up the figure would vanish. The rain made no difference. If she had to live the rest of her life under water, so be it. To exist in such a way attached her to the earth and could only be good for her. Every step forward put on another year of life, but Emma had to be reached and taken home because each minute out there might take a year off her life.

She looked up every dozen paces to make sure there was still some object to aim for. She laughed at herself. There was no one to hear. Raindrops distorted what she saw. The figure was probably a poor old tramp with nowhere to go. She wanted to turn back, for fear he should jump on her. Girls had been raped on Parkers Piece at night. But it was Emma. There was no mistaking the way she hunched her shoulders. Clara called, and hurried breathlessly on. Emma stood with head bowed, unable to hear.

Clara held her arm. ‘Whatever are you doing? You’ll get pneumonia – at least!’

She looked. Her skin was like clay, glazed so that the rain poured off. ‘I’m trying to find out what it’s like to be alone.’

Clara drew her close. She smelled of rain and sweat. ‘I’ve been looking all over. You might at least have told me where you were going, then you could have been alone for as long as you liked. But just to go off like this for your own crackbrained reason is too much. You’ve no consideration for anybody except yourself. Don’t you think it’s time you pulled yourself together and behaved a bit more reasonably? Perhaps it doesn’t matter what happens to you, but you ought at least to think about the baby you’re going to have.’ She gripped her arm. ‘So let’s go back to the house before you really get ill. You’re going to need a hot bath and something to drink if you aren’t to get a bad cold. Now come on, and stop all this bloody stupid nonsense.’

She was putting it on, but the severe tone was right, under the circumstances, she thought. We are all Death’s prisoners, she had heard a preacher say from his pulpit on the edge of the market one morning. Life was a battlefield from which there could be no survivors. Once the fight begins, losses continually occur, even in the most favoured conditions, till you become one of them. She made her observations and, with so many dreadful events all of a sudden to endure, thought it her duty to record the fact that no family was free of tragic times.

Emma allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led back to the midday autumnal gloom of the buildings.

10

Her bedroom looked over the squalid backyards. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t have got a better place,’ she said, but Emma reminded her that the inside of the house was clean and comfortable, and they were lucky not to be in China or Russia or Germany, for they had coal, food and clothes, and didn’t have to live in the rain with no shelter. They had each other. Life was good when you weren’t standing alone in the rain. If she could go on living, she would be happy and have no complaints. She wanted her baby to have a long life, without war, want or inner misery. Her life had been fortunate, she said when Clara sat on the bed and held her hand, and yet on the eve of the greatest acquisition she had a fear of losing everything. A senseless anxiety troubled her day and night. There was no sleep, and no peace. Did Clara think that only a woman could have such feelings?

Clara didn’t know. If a question was asked with too much intensity she was always lost for an answer, and Emma never wanted to know anything that would be satisfied by a casual response. Emma didn’t wait for answers she knew would never come, or for answers that would never convince her if they did. She then asked if she weren’t trying to live out all possible anxiety and hopelessness so that there would be so much less for her child to inherit. Heaven only knows, Clara said, hardly able to endure the torment settling on to her from Emma’s disturbed state. She suffered with her, and did not know whether or not Emma noticed. But Emma was aware of everything, and what diference could it make that Clara was equally tormented? The suffering was doubled, but not thereby diminished. Clara had no say in the matter, and went through equal anguish with her sister, a process over which she did not wish to have any control in the hope that by taking some of the burden, Emma would sooner or later feel its intolerable weight shifting away from herself.

Clara thought that if she spent another moment with her she would descend into a madness from which recovery would be impossible. She felt herself saturated with resentment at having to bear so much, but her objections were not directed at Emma, who in her misery seemed either unaware or unconcerned that it was passing with ever-increasing intensity to her sister. The mechanism had been there since childhood, for Clara recollected that Emma’s infantile despair had in its own way been equally desolate for her. She, on the other hand, had never in either adult or childish misery witnessed any similar effect on Emma when she – Clara – was depressed, for Emma at such times kept her temperament intact against all influences, not out of callousness but because she was set too firmly into her own sphere to know what was happening. Any sympathy Emma might express was mere casual condolence. She certainly wouldn’t waste time on sharing half-imagined woes.

When Emma’s mood lifted for no apparent reason Clara, with pain still searing her heart, went to the barometer in the hall to see if the pressure had altered, to find out whether the needle was now set fair when it had previously indicated stormy. She was disappointed to see that it denied her idea, having hoped to find some system to Emma’s moods that would help her to counter them. She stayed baffled, because while Emma’s upsets undoubtedly served to get her through another few days of reasonable life, they left Clara mentally crippled, and even more so when she tried to hide her anguish from Emma in case it caused another of her fits. She contained herself in the hope that the residue of her own misery would go away and leave them both in peace at last.

This volume of Clara’s journal ended with: ‘Not beyond here. No point going on.’ But a pocket diary contained occasional remarks and pencilled comments on occurrences she later thought worth noting, and entries in a jotting pad dealt with the coming and going of their mother, the doctor’s visits, days when the weather was fine and sunny, and walks into town to go shopping or to the pictures. In an unposted letter she described how Rachel came one day and, finding Emma in one of her ‘moods’, dismissed it with such astonishing ease and panache that the raucous half-hour quarrel which ensued stung Emma finally to speechlessness and weeping. After a while she became girlish, laughed and behaved normally till Rachel left for the railway station. Clara felt gratitude at her mother’s courage and ability. Rachel wasn’t afraid to shout, and was in no sense willing to stifle helplessly under Emma’s injurious silence or frivolous accusations. She marvelled at her mother, but did not regret that she herself was unable to use the same methods.

11

The night was created from a snowstorm of the previous day, making it easy to imagine wolves howling in the spacious Fens and searching for the blood of infants and the warmth of mothers in the city. No one could avoid meeting them in their dreams, or cease to imagine them in the snowy daylight of dark outside their tight-shut windows. The wolf in Emma was trying to get out by gnawing at her backbone, and her screams kept the street awake. Eventually the wolf would streak away, having drunk all her blood, join its lupine brothers still howling to enter whatever house they could find unguarded. Time had reached a stop, while Clara, Rachel and the midwife kept watch, and waited for either the night or the world to end. Each sound was muffled by snow and bleached by pale gas light as the agony that none of them could reach came and went and came again with an intensity towards dawn that they thought could not possibly increase.

Rachel and the midwife made a show of giving practical advice, but nothing mattered to Emma except that she must reach the end of the tunnel or be torn to fragments by the wolf that had her in its teeth. ‘What do you say?’ Rachel asked when she tried to speak.

Out of the sweat, and the state for which she knew no word, came: ‘Get it away from me.’

Clara waited in the parlour, hoping to die if her sister’s ordeal did not stop, wondering why they didn’t help her, or put her out of her misery like a dog or a horse – for if I were in the same state, she thought, vowing that she never would be, I’d surely ask them to do a kindness and end it by a single shot, as I would if I’d been left to die on a battlefield. Had John gone through similar agony? she wondered, torn half to pieces, yet not dead, and pleading with one of his men to kill him?

Every baby was born the same way, the mother as if mortally wounded yet recovering. A better system’s not yet been invented, the midwife said, in effect doing nothing. Clara made tea. She toasted bread and boiled eggs to see them through the night. They ate, as if to sustain Emma by it.

At ten minutes past eight, when Clara was dozing in the rocking chair, the midwife shook her and said it was a boy. Did she want to come and look at the eight-pound wonder? I bloody do not, she thought, opening the curtains. The snowing had stopped but lay thick along the street. Children were going to school. A postman struggled through drifts with his heavy bag. How could the world go on at such a time? She walked upstairs, knowing that like the wave the world was permanent – as the song said – and she began to laugh but remembered to stop when opening the door.

The wolf had gone, and left a blanket of snow behind. Emma was asleep, equally whitened by the night, the baby by her side. ‘She’ll call him Thomas,’ the midwife said. ‘That’s nice, isn’t it?’

‘It’s got to be called something,’ Clara answered.

Rachel laid a finger on Emma’s forehead. ‘I thought her time would never end.’ Clara waited for her to say more, but she leaned across the bed and put the palm of her hand under Emma’s nightdress, holding it on her left breast till she thought to take the golden Star of David from her own neck and lay it on the table as a present for the baby. ‘Please God they’ll both be well.’

‘We shall have to make sure it’s the end of her troubles,’ Clara said.

‘Nothing ever ends,’ Rachel told her, before leaving for London a fortnight later. ‘Our lives only go on so that Death can get its reckoning.’

Clara laughed, and so did Emma, who put her arms around her mother and said after a kiss: ‘Where did you hear such sombre old twaddle?’

Rachel pushed her away, but Clara noted that it was a playful action. There was an air of affection before their parting.

‘It certainly isn’t twaddle. Eternal truths need stressing again and again. They always have – especially to one’s children. And you’re still children, don’t forget, till I die, whatever you may think.’

‘Eternal truths!’ Emma exclaimed. ‘Really, they only enslave us, mother.’

‘They do if you want them to,’ Rachel said. ‘But they needn’t at all. Eternal truths keep people like us civilized. We’d be badly off without them. And they’re more than necessary for the rest of the world.’

Emma smiled, and helped her on with her coat. ‘I hope not.’

‘Hope!’ Rachel said. ‘You won’t get very far on that – though I should hope, I suppose, that you’ll both find good husbands before very long.’

But Clara had made up her mind never to marry, and never to have children. Any such process would certainly stop with her. A magazine article said that all women should have children, even if only one, for what woman, the wise man asked, wanted to be ‘the end of the line’? It was bad for the woman, bad for society, and bad for the country. Clara threw the magazine across the parlour. If she were destined to be lonely at the end of the line, so be it, she snorted. And what damned line did the fool mean? A clothes line? Let the idiot have children himself, if he could. And if she didn’t, there were millions around her who most certainly would, so as far as the country went there was nothing to fear. Let the people breed. It would give them something to do in their otherwise empty lives. Nature had organized things very well, except that the country had too many inhabitants for comfort, judging by the queues for buses, trains and picture-houses which hadn’t been there before the war. But as for her – no children, she told herself, ever.

12

When the train arrived at Liverpool Street station they said that Rachel had been robbed, and then died from a heart attack, but a farmer found her purse by the railway line and gave it to the police. Nothing was missing. Her lost Star of David, Clara explained to her father when he asked, had been given to the new baby.

Percy wrote in his letter that his dear wife must have passed away in an effort to get out of the speeding train, and dropped the purse during the heart-failure which stopped her from doing so. She had not wanted to die while in the moving carriage, and perhaps she would still be here if she hadn’t done such a lot of travelling in the last few months. He wondered if Emma knew that self-centred actions invariably had such repercussions? The strain on her mother had been more than either she or Clara had imagined. He had told her not to go so often to Cambridge, and they had quarrelled about it on more than one occasion. But she had been too devoted to listen, and in such a matter he had not persisted. She was one of the good people of the world, without whose kind we might all become barbarians again.

Across the letter Clara had written in broad red pencil: ‘SNAKE! HYPOCRITE!’ – and called him as much to his face after the funeral. ‘Your sort are the barbarians,’ she wrote in the small space left after he had signed his name.

13

‘I had a letter from father,’ she said.

‘You are lucky,’ Emma replied.

‘Aren’t you interested?’

‘Burn it – for all I care.’

Clara always mentioned Emma and the baby when she wrote to her father, if only to prove to herself that she was not the sort of person who would become a barbarian if people like her mother ceased to exist. She tried to count herself charitable in her thoughts and at least some of her actions, while aware that she rarely succeeded in doing anything good. Her father’s favourite saying was that the road to hell was paved with good intentions, and she decided that what for many people might be a very effective footpath she had made into a Ministry of Transport ‘A’ Road by concocting in her own mind plans for helpful actions which through inanition she neglected to carry out. Her only kindnesses, she supposed, were those which came to her suddenly and were accomplished with no inner discussion. To mull over doing good beforehand was a way of giving herself the credit for it, though she would never allow herself to receive any when she did help someone.

She wrote to her father frequently now that he was alone, and in one letter added a postcript too quickly to be considered, saying wouldn’t it be best if the three of them came to live at home? ‘The lease will be finished on this hole of a house in a couple of months, and it’s difficult to know where we will go when it is.’

The letter was in the post before she wondered whether her suggestion had been wise. She could hardly go to the pillar box and get it back and had, after all, only done it for the best. ‘For the best she had done it,’ her mother used to say, when Clara dropped her dinner plate in the nursery, or pulled a plant in the garden, and Emma would take up the call so that Rachel told her to stop or she too would be sent to her room.

Clara waited, till she forgot either to wait or hope, and as the days went by Emma fed her baby with care and assiduity. Time had no meaning now that she was so occupied. ‘It’s only for a while, though,’ she said emphatically. ‘I’ll want to do something soon.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Work. Act. Get out of this.’

Did she think she could find any sort of job with an illegitimate child clinging to her waist?

‘I want to travel.’ She put her book down. ‘There’s no place in the world I don’t want to go. But I wish I’d been born a man.’

Clara laughed. ‘They have their troubles too, or so I understand.’

‘Oh yes, but I’d still be me, and things would be easier. I’d be able to do much more. I wouldn’t feel so weighed down with unnecessary complications.’

‘Things will turn out all right.’ Clara lit a cigarette. ‘Except, of course, that you have Thomas to care for now.’

‘Give me one. You know I like to smoke after lunch. I’ll get someone to look after him whenever I go away.’

‘A person you can trust, I hope.’ Clara could not see herself nursing a baby, not even her sister’s. The idea seemed ludicrous. ‘Mother would have taken him, I expect, but I can’t imagine father setting to.’

Emma lifted her book again. ‘I shall find someone.’

On fine days the maid pushed the high perambulator down the street, often when Clara thought the weather too damp and bitter for him to be out. He would get a chill, or something worse. But Emma said he had to get used to the elements, otherwise he would be vulnerable to all sorts of things when he grew up.

Their father said in a letter that the emptiness of the house became more appalling every day. He passed the time in a trance, looking forward to the night, but when sleep did come he woke up because the house was on fire, only to find that it was not. The nightmare came back, and he was afraid that he would be burned to death on a night when he did not dream at all. He wanted to hear real voices instead of imaginary ones, no matter what they said about him. The servants had left, and he didn’t know why. Perhaps Clara would arrange things. Emma and the baby could have the large sunny room overlooking the garden.

The letter was not a concession, she knew, but a demand that Clara could not ignore. She reflected on how the world must be full of old, selfish and no longer innocent children. Most had never been innocent, though they had all been helpless. Her father still was. He took care to remind her that he did not have much longer to live. He lied out of self-pity. She thought about his life of recurring and debilitating mental agony that was inexplicable until John had been killed in action, and Rachel had died. He and Rachel had been such sweethearts; right till the end, she thought scathingly; and he would never know how lucky he had been that one of the Chosen had chosen him.

The only hope of getting another house, Clara said, was to take a cottage. It was impossible to find anything in Cambridge. But Emma couldn’t bear to be cut off somewhere in the countryside. ‘I’m dying of loneliness as it is. In any case, can you imagine me in some honeysuckle bijou rural slum without even room to swing a baby? Lighting oil lamps and getting water from a well? I’d become prim, and eccentric, and as coarse as an old witch. I don’t feel like growing old just yet.’

‘The Jenkinsons will be back from New Zealand in three weeks,’ Clara reminded her. ‘We have to move.’

‘It’ll be fun having nowhere to go. Do you think we’ll be put out on the street like vagrants? What an adventure if we have to go to the workhouse!’

‘Oh do be serious.’

‘All right. If it upsets you, I’ll do as you say.’

‘Father asked us to go back.’

‘You mean he wants you to be his housekeeper?’

‘He’d like us to go home.’

Emma was silent.

‘Don’t pout like that. I suppose he does think we’ll make his life tolerable, but it might suit us. After all, Highgate’s a good place to live, and you’ll be quite close to town. Maybe we’ll get to a show, or go to dinner now and again. Even I fancy a bit of distraction.’

The baby cried, and Emma ran up the stairs calling: ‘Anything you like. I’ll do whatever you say.’

14

Emma watched her pack. ‘You’re like the Rock of Gibraltar.’

Clara hadn’t thought of it like that, saw herself as stupidly undertaking tasks beyond her strength, and never able to change her mind or complain once she had started, but always more or less muddling through. It was not a matter of assuming her mother’s place so much as of facing situations Rachel wouldn’t have considered. There seemed nothing but herself standing between order and disaster, yet the chaos inside could dissolve her strength at any moment. She knew she must hold on and not let it happen, and felt frightened at each new responsibility.

The carriers came for their trunks, cases and perambulator. In half an hour a motor cab would take them to the station, and Mr and Mrs Jenkinson would not know that the house had been occupied in their absence. Clara would lock all doors and give the keys to the estate agents on their way to the railway. The maid had been sent off with her box and an extra ten shillings, and there was nothing to do but sit and wait. ‘We won’t notice the bad weather in London,’ Clara said.

Emma sat by the last of the embers with the swaddled baby on her knees. ‘The first thing we must do is get a nursemaid, so that we can go out together.’

‘It’ll be spring on Hampstead Heath,’ Clara said.

‘We’ll have supper at Romano’s! London’s going to be marvellous. I hope our old gramophone still goes. We’ll go to the Alhambra and the Empire. We’ll actually see people in Hyde Park! I want to come back to life. I feel I’ve been cut off for years.’

‘You poor thing,’ Clara mocked. ‘I do hope you won’t be disappointed in the great metropolis.’

‘I won’t,’ Emma said vehemently. ‘Believe me.’

‘Well, there’ll be more to do than just go around enjoying yourself.’

When Emma reached to press her hand the baby almost fell from her knee. She caught him in time, but cried out: ‘Don’t bother me with your sanctimonious advice. I’ve told you before that I don’t like it. I can look after myself.’

Clara sat straight. Perhaps there would be an end to it soon. There had to be. She wanted to go away, be by herself at a quiet resort in Switzerland where the scenery would rest her soul. She would stay at a hotel on the Rigi for a couple of months and refresh herself, and perhaps meet some other woman of the right sort to talk to in the lounge, or go on long walks together.

‘I keep losing my temper,’ Emma said, ‘but I don’t mean to. I’m sorry.’

Clara smiled. What nonsense to consider taking a holiday while her family needed her. ‘I suppose I’d lose mine if I were in your place. Thank God we’re going home. We’ll be better off there.’

In the train, thin vomit slopped down Thomas’s shawl, and Emma’s eyes enlarged with panic. ‘What shall we do?’

An elderly white-haired man reading his newspaper moved along the seat for fear he would be showered.

‘We must get him to a doctor,’ Emma cried.

‘I wouldn’t pull that communication cord if I were you,’ the man said. ‘It’s a very serious offence.’

Emma turned, forgetting about Thomas. ‘It’s my bloody baby, and he might be dying, and if he is I’ll pull whatever I bloody well like. That’s what the bloody communication cord is for.’ She passed Thomas to Clara, who lifted him high against her shoulder and patted him gently till the vomiting and screaming stopped.

‘Well, that’s my advice,’ the man said. ‘It’s not necessary now, is it?’

Emma sat down. ‘It might have been. I’d stop the world if I thought it was necessary, and since it’s my baby, I’m the one to know, not you.’

Thomas slept, and Clara gave him back. ‘I often get the horrors,’ Emma said, ‘thinking that something dreadful will happen to him. He sucks me dry, yet seems so frail at the same time.’

‘He’s strong and healthy,’ Clara asserted. ‘Look at him. He gets bigger every day, the way he feeds from you, and goes out in all weathers.’

‘I know, but I can’t help the thoughts I have. I dream he’s dead, and when I hear him screaming in the morning because he’s hungry, instead of being annoyed at not having slept properly, I feel so glad that I cry as I feed him.’

Clara could only think that maybe Emma was lucky at being able to give such full expression to her emotional ups and downs. Yet she suffered for no real reason, and her dread was a contagion that spread many times compounded, though it was different for Clara who had nothing in her own mind and body by which to give it reality. Emma’s misery was based on the fulness of herself, but in Clara it only engendered emptiness or dread.

Percy stood inside the iron gate, looking along the road for their taxi. When it stopped, and Clara was halfway across the pavement, he was still gazing in the other direction. He had short grey hair smartly brushed, and seemed younger than when Clara had seen him at the funeral. She called. He turned slowly and smiled. His hand shook as it came out to her. ‘I had business in town, but I put everything off so as to be here and greet you both.’

She drew her hand away to help Emma. The cab driver steadied her out, and laughed as he got ready to catch Thomas in case he fell. ‘My wife dropped the young ‘un,’ he said, ‘so you could say she dropped it twice, in a manner of speaking.’

Percy sent him away with five shillings so as to stop his foul laughter. He tried to smile while looking at the baby. ‘Who’s he like?’

‘Mother,’ Emma said.

‘Do you think so?’

‘No doubt about it.’

‘I see what you mean. And yet I’m not so sure.’

‘He’s from her side,’ Emma insisted.

‘It’s a bit too early to tell, at any rate so vehemently.’ He walked before them to the porch, and rang the bell with great irritation. An elderly woman opened the door. ‘Help in the ladies, and their child,’ he said. ‘Get Audrey to take the cases.’

The cab driver had left their things on the pavement.

15

‘I’m going to like it here,’ said Emma. ‘It isn’t raining, the house is big, and father will soon get used to us.’

Clara lay on the bed. ‘It’s good to be back on my old mattress. Where’s Thomas?’

‘Audrey’s got him. She says she knows about babies because there were nine in her family. She can feed him, as well, when I get him on to bottled milk. I don’t want to be tethered for ever like some animal.’

At the first dining-room meal Emma said she was going to call in a decorator and have her room painted white. While it was being done she would have to occupy her mother’s room. Percy said he thought she should do no such thing. He wouldn’t allow it, in fact. Emma looked at him a full minute without speaking, her caramel eyes glowing as if she would strike him should he say anything further. As soon as he finished dessert he got up and went to his study. They heard his door slam.

Emma opened all the windows. The subtle smell of her mother that remained reminded her of her own. Sunlight cut the bed. She took off the counterpane and turned the mattress, tears falling on to the cloth that covered the springs. I didn’t kill you, she said. No one kills anyone. You don’t even kill yourself.

‘Will you bring Thomas’s crib in?’ Clara said from the doorway.

She turned. ‘Did I kill her?’

The fact that Clara knew who she meant proved that she might well have.

‘Of course not. Father’s a fool for hinting it.’

Emma dried her eyes. While they spread the sheets she said: ‘Audrey can take the crib into her room. Thomas will sleep there. I want to be alone at night.’

Emma knew, she said, that Percy did not like her. She had always felt his hostility, and having an illegitimate baby to their name did not improve matters. He had adored his wife, and had disliked Emma (who closely resembled her) for those faults of Rachel which he had never allowed himself to acknowledge in case they spoiled life between them. Like all people who cherished each other as if they were still children in the nursery, the relationship had only been tolerable when they were mindlessly happy. Percy had known this very well, and had done everything to keep it so. Ruses of brain-fever and nervous breakdown had not been too much to manage, Emma said, when they talked about it in Clara’s room.

They had tea brought up from the kitchen, and sat in armchairs by the window. ‘You imagine too much,’ Clara replied.

Emma’s hand shook when she poured the milk. ‘Anything I imagine is real. I didn’t think that for there not to have been some truth in it.’

‘I dare say there is, but it’s hardly fair to father. Not to mention mother.’ Clara was convinced. Emma’s sense of reality was reinforced by the tone of her voice, which Clara knew was not true of herself because she rarely pondered on such matters, or thought them important when she did. Emma’s speculations could also be outrageous. ‘I wonder what mother and father were like in bed together?’

‘I refuse to talk about it.’

‘Well, I wonder. There’s no harm in that.’

‘Much like anybody else, I suppose.’

Emma broke a piece of toast and passed half to Clara. ‘I find it disgusting to think about – in a way.’

Clara’s mouth was full. ‘Don’t, then.’

‘I try not to.’

Clara could not let the topic go so easily. ‘Is it hard to try not to?’

‘I think about it whether I try to or not. But I don’t mind. Maybe it’s good for me. Such thoughts never occurred to me before Thomas was born.’

Clara changed the subject because there seemed nothing more to be got from it. ‘Why do you always wear that Jewish star?’

She held it between her fingers. ‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Very attractive, I suppose.’

‘I can tell you don’t think so. Thomas will have it when he’s old enough.’

‘You mean men wear them?’

‘He can put it under his vest.’

‘Why do you want him to, especially?’

‘Mother gave it to him, that’s why. I’m also glad I had him circumcised. She wanted that, too.’

Clara wished they could be together without so much talk. ‘I don’t see that it matters, these days.’

‘It certainly does. Mother wanted him to be part of her line, not father’s. She was getting her sense back at the end. When he grows up he can be what he likes, but if he wants to be Jewish he can be. If I die, at least I’ll leave him with a choice, and you can’t give a child anything better. Anybody can have good health, good looks, and even a good job, but to have a choice to make – that’s special! Not that I’m sure which way he’ll go. It’ll be up to him.’

Clara, sighing, didn’t know what to say. Her hopes sounded so unnecessary. ‘You won’t die, silly. He’ll be what you want him to be. And he may not want anything to do with it.’

‘He will. I only wish mother had given me such a choice.’

Clara thought she had. ‘I jolly well don’t, speaking for myself. There’s enough to worry about, without that.’

‘You’re so plain and shallow. The more one has to worry about, the more chance there is to think other things.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

After a while Emma said: ‘Have you seen mother’s books?’

‘What books?’

‘You haven’t?’

‘Is that why you moved into her room? What a dreadful snooper!’ – a riposte for being called plain and shallow.

‘Her dresses are still there, so I suppose that when you looked you didn’t notice the lid that opens from the inside of the wardrobe. I found letters from father written before they were married, and some he’d sent from the asylum, as well as a few she’d written to him. She must have got them back for some reason, or he gave them to her for safe keeping. They were better than I expected. But there were also a few old books in Hebrew and German – which I’ll keep, if you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t. But will father?’

‘He won’t have to. Thomas will have them one day.’

‘This Jewish thing has gone to your head.’

Clara was sorry. She had spoken without thought, which one should never do with Emma, who looked anguished, not so much, as it turned out, for what had been said, but because: ‘I still can’t believe mother’s gone. It frightens me to think about her life. If only she’d come back for an hour, for me to say all I’d never said when she was alive. I didn’t tell her how much I loved her, and now it’s not possible.’ She shook her head. ‘Life under such conditions is hardly worth while.’

Clara was alert with disagreement. ‘You’re trying to make Thomas become what mother would have wanted him to be, because she felt guilty at having given up her Judaism.’

‘She never did. She was always Jewish.’

‘Oh, she wasn’t all that deliberate about it. One never is. But have it your way. You’re trying to get him back on to the “one true path” then. Is that it?’

Emma’s face expressed inner enlightenment. ‘Yes, you’re right. But there are many true paths. I only want him to be like me and mother. Different to you and father.’

Clara shook her head. ‘What rubbish.’

‘I want him to be civilized. He’ll find out what I mean when he makes his choice.’

Clara wanted to be alone. She had nothing else to say. There was a limit to the amount of talk she could put up with. ‘I’ll be glad to start the spring-cleaning tomorrow. We can do the drawing-room first, and that’ll take some work. The place hasn’t been cleaned for I don’t know how long.’

‘A few more days’ – Emma stood – ‘and it’s into town for me. I want to spring-clean my life, not this dreadful old house. I wouldn’t care if it fell down, as long as we weren’t in it,’ she laughed.

She had been glad to seek refuge here, Clara thought after Emma had gone to her room. If Emma was tied in all ways to the baby, she was harnessed into organizing the household, and for a while neither could go into town. The most they did was to go shopping or to the bank in Highgate village. Otherwise they kept to the house as if they had rented that also. The upstairs back windows looked south, and they could see the Houses of Parliament on a good day. The sun fitfully blessed the grey sprawl, as if they were on the outskirts of a strange city after two seasons in a distant wilderness. Clara reached to the fable for her journal and fountain pen, too weary to write yet too stimulated by the conversation with Emma to resist doing so.

The maid accepted Thomas as if he were her brother or son. She fed him, played with him, and daily pushed him in the pram to Waterlow Park or Parliament Hill, walking along the foliaged pathways and under trees turning to a heavier green as the year went on. In the rain she clipped the hood and canvas barrier into place, so that he was snug against the elements.

With much screaming he was weaned from the breast and put on to bottled milk. Audrey fed him, as well as cleaned him, put him to bed, and got him up in the morning. A new girl did odd tasks in her place and hurried about on errands, and Audrey was solely in charge of Thomas.

Clara looked at him. Emma was in town, and Audrey had not yet taken him out. He lay in his pram, eyes open and staring at her, so clean and calm, so innocent. She wondered how much he saw at six months old, how much he knew of what was going on around him. He was unwanted, and would have to take his chance in life. The choice Emma had so thoughtlessly lumbered him with would be no advantage. He would be better off knowing nothing, at least until a time when such problems no longer mattered. Maybe Emma wasn’t serious. In her life of going about town she would forget her ideas, one enthusiasm often being swept away by the onslaught of another.

He saw her properly, and smiled. She was sure he smiled. His lips moved, and his eyes sparkled on opening wide. He stared, as if wondering why he smiled. His thin dark hair already had that subtle sheen of red. She lifted a finger, as if telling him to be still because he had nothing to smile fulsomely about. He reached for her thumb. He made a noise of laughter, and she felt sorry for him, as well as pity for Emma. She knew a moment of grief for her mother, her father, and for herself – feelings she disliked intensely. She touched his warm cheek consolingly, then told herself not to be stupid, and walked upstairs to see why the maid was taking so long getting ready.

Her father, on his afternoon walk, made sure he went in the opposite direction to Audrey and Thomas. He did not have the physical strength to force his face towards the baby when he was anywhere near his perambulator. He passed him as if some form of contamination might leap across.

Since Rachel died he had turned his back on life, as if she had taken his spirit with her. His nerves were no good again, he said, not hiding the fact that he blamed Emma for her mother’s death. His face was a mask which prevented any sympathy breaking through. No one deserved it, his expression said. The hurt flesh around his grey eyes indicated that he had had enough of trying to understand. Such efforts hadn’t worked and never would. Emma told him there might still be something to live for.

‘Father,’ she said at dinner, on a rare evening when she stayed at home, ‘why don’t you get married again?’

The cook brought in a platter of lamb chops, and Clara dropped one before getting it to her place.

‘Careless,’ Percy said. ‘Grip it tight.’

They took food on to their plates, and Clara hoped that her sister would forget her unseemly question. Why must she make more trouble than was absolutely necessary? Or any trouble at all? It was too much to expect.

‘I asked,’ said Emma, whose place at table was to his left, ‘whether or not you might ever think of getting married again, father?’

‘Oh do stop,’ Clara called.

He looked up. ‘I loved your mother too much. Besides, I’m an old man.’

Emma laughed. ‘You’re not much more than sixty. And if you really did love mother you’d certainly want to marry again. It would be nice for you, and good for the rest of us.’

He was about to smile – Clara was sure of it – but changed his mind. She saw it happening, in his predictable, half-conscious yet deliberate way, all emotions mixed to create the effect he absolutely wanted. And who, she thought, is any different? But she longed to get out of such force-fields, which by their spreading torment robbed you of life’s enjoyment. Her ideal state was an existence, if she must pass hers with other people, of placid well-bred diplomacy. Otherwise, she would live alone.

‘One usually meets someone and falls in love before getting married.’ He spoke less severely. ‘I haven’t yet seen anyone who would be a likely prospect. A marriage of convenience, or one to suit my wayward daughter, isn’t the sort of thing I would care to indulge in.’

Emma persevered. ‘You might meet a pleasant young woman. There are plenty about.’

She wanted him – and Clara could see that he knew it – to marry only so that she could then accuse him of never having loved their mother. He’d had enough, however. ‘When you yourself get married, I could be in a better frame of mind to think about it.’

‘Does Clara have to get married, too?’

‘I’d rather go on with my dinner,’ he said, ‘than put up with your tyranny.’

‘I’ll never get married,’ Clara announced, feeling like a boulder before the floodwater.

‘I suppose we’re lucky mother didn’t feel that way,’ said Emma. ‘Or are we?’

Clara picked up the handbell and rang for cook to come and take their plates. ‘Perhaps she did.’

‘Though I suppose,’ went on Emma, ‘that she would quite like you to marry again.’

‘She would not,’ he said. ‘She is now in heaven, and she would be eternally distressed.’

He had thought himself safe behind the palisade of his last request. But he doesn’t know Emma. He can’t possibly know her, Clara thought, since he didn’t really know mother very well, either. Or so Emma believed. Perhaps she was right, having a sure knowledge of people’s weaknesses. But he torments her, so she’s only getting her own back. No, it feels much worse than that.

He stood, and threw his napkin on to the table. The cook moved around to lift his plate. He put a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. Clara asked cook to bring in the dessert, then said to Emma: ‘Why can’t you know when to stop?’

He sat down. ‘I must ask you never to mention that subject again, not in any way whatsoever. If you do I will find it impossible to be in the same house with you.’

‘You’re nothing but a male bully,’ Emma responded coolly. ‘You have no emotional latitude. This is a dead house, and you make it so. We all live under your conditions, right down to what we can think. But you aren’t going to tell me what I can and can’t say.’

Clara felt riven by fever, cast between freezing and boiling, one part horrified for her father, the other side of her saying to herself: ‘Good for you, Emma, tell him off as he deserves.’ She had to admit that in some respects their life had been better when they’d had a place of their own, in that their antagonisms didn’t spread.

‘I wasn’t trying to annoy you,’ Emma said. ‘You could easily have laughed at my suggestion, instead of creating such a tragic atmosphere.’

Their mother had only been dead a few months, and Clara reminded her that people generally needed a year to get over a loved one’s death, if they ever did. Emma may not have been malicious, but she was surely insensitive to go on about it when father didn’t want her to.

Percy folded his napkin neatly, put it into its ivory ring, and went to smoke a cigar in his study, where he kept a decanter of port and could sit at his desk and stare at the large leather-bordered blotter till he was roused by the need for more port or to relight his cigar; or he would, with the smouldering cigar between his fingers, cover sheets of paper with automatic scribble-writing, using his favourite Waterman fountain pen, till his fingers ached too intensely for him to go on, or until a length of ash scattered itself on the paper as a reminder that he must stop because there were other things in life, such as a further glass of port and another cigar. He didn’t notice Clara set a coffee tray on his desk.

‘I suppose,’ she said to Emma in the living-room, ‘that he’s happy, after his fashion.’

‘I hope so.’ Emma added that by talking frankly about his situation she was only helping to bring his thoughts into the open. That was what he found so intolerable. Well, it was understandable. She wouldn’t want hers to be forced out in such a way, in which case she wouldn’t worry him again. If he wanted to know what he was thinking he could discover for himself – or not, as the case may be. She was sorry, and would apologize in the morning.

Clara said she ought to, and that from now on she should ‘act her age’ when at table with father, to which Emma replied that she knew very well what her age was, and couldn’t do anything but act it. Her age was part of her. It was a wide age that spanned any number of years, and not a narrow segment of time in which every tight-laced emotion was predictable.

There must be some good in him, Emma went on, because that, presumably, had been similar to what he had loved in mother, and maybe what in the end he couldn’t stand about her, because after she had died he didn’t want any more of it in the house, at least not from one of his daughters.

‘You’re wrong about father,’ Clara said. ‘You probably remind him so much of mother that it’s doubly painful when you go on as you do.’

‘But mother was always quiet as a mouse.’

‘In the last twenty years she was,’ Clara replied, ‘but at the beginning she was very lively – at least by her own account.’

‘Till he crushed it out of her by self-indulgent fits of so-called insanity,’ Emma said.

‘He’d had them before he met her.’ It’s no use asking where it all began. Here we are, yet because we must put up with all the questions and upsets we ought to forget about them. But Clara knew that to do so would mean cutting away nine-tenths of thought and talk. Emma stood before the fireplace and looked at the oil-painting of John above the mantelpiece. She gazed for some minutes, as if passing on her reflections to the face that could never give off the same life she remembered from him.

‘Father used his illness to try and break her spirit.’ She turned to Clara. ‘But only John being killed did that. Where’s the moral in it all?’

‘I don’t know. Is there one?’

‘There must be.’

‘Hating father won’t help you to find it.’

‘Oh, I don’t really hate him, but I do wish he wouldn’t die on us every day now mother’s no longer here. He’s spitting on her memory. Don’t you see, Clara? I love them both, yet I’m trying to make sure we have a better life than she had. Her beginning with father was a terrible mistake for both of them, but mostly for her. He’s trying to reduce us to the same state she was in most of her life. And I don’t know how to stop him!’

Tears were falling down Clara’s cheeks. ‘It isn’t his fault.’

‘Nor hers. Nor yours. Nor mine. It just happens. That’s worst of all. Things happen whether we want them to or not. It’s too horrible to bear.’

Clara cried aloud at the searing notion of her sister making the same mistake as her mother, though on a grander scale. She sobbed, unmercifully torn inside. She reached for Emma and held her tight. ‘Please don’t go on like this. I can’t tolerate any more.’

But she didn’t, as Emma thought, mean stop talking about their parents. She was pleading for her not to carry on so senselessly. Don’t go into town so often. Don’t stay out all night with men you pick up. What are you looking for, trying to find, doing to yourself? Why don’t you stay in, sit still, or do something else? She couldn’t explain, knew it would be useless anyway, that it would only bring words crushing back, might even drive Emma to worse things.

Emma too was weeping, both bodies burning together, but nothing more could be said.

16

When Emma stayed in for a few days, Audrey would not be allowed either to feed or change Thomas, nor take him out. Emma was with him from waking up to putting him to bed.

The decorators had come and gone, and she was back in the large front room, Thomas’s crib in the dressing-room opening off. When the weather was fine she sat on the veranda steps. She looked up from her book at Thomas in his pram below staring at a black-and-white cat walking the branch of a plum tree. She read, or she did nothing.

From the living-room window Clara noticed how often she looked straight ahead with a faint smile towards the wall at the end of the garden, a hand occasionally moving to straighten her hair. At the slightest cry she would be down in a moment to comfort Thomas. Or she would pick him up. His priority was total, and Clara did not know whether she preferred Emma’s mood of devoted mother (which excluded everyone else from the union of herself and the baby) or that of the distracted young woman who set off for town like an animal loose out of a cage.

Clara wondered why only these two choices were possible, for neither seemed good for any woman. Clara wanted a stable and predictable order, which guaranteed peace everywhere. She craved the ideal family which did not exist.

Emma’s calm was the eye of the storm, and out of sisterly love Clara shared the space there. But when the tempest broke Clara would be looking for that calm zone in order to escape the pain and fury, and when she realized that no peace existed anywhere she would be reduced to a tearful passion that seemed to damage her beyond all possibility of feeling normal again.

She wondered how long such a permanently threatening state could last. The only danger was to feel that she would not be able to tolerate the disturbance much longer, for she sensed a dismaying fragility in herself that might lead to failure in her duty towards Emma. She assumed that similar thoughts had planted themselves in her father’s heart as well, for he did not speak to Emma, and never asked where she had gone.

He rarely talked to anybody, stayed in his study, and often ate his meals there. When Emma wondered why, it was only to add that she didn’t care, though Clara knew she suffered by being cast as a stranger in the house. To justify his neglect, her father never let the expression of aggrieved deprivation go from his face while either sister was nearby. The turmoil of his earlier life had taught him how to control his family, and Clara saw that only Emma had the courage to prevent such power going unchecked, though at a cost to her that was alarming to witness. It was as if she suspected him of wanting to drive her to some awful fate in return for having, as he supposed, caused their mother’s death.

When Emma was out of the house the pall of her misery shifted to Clara, who could not rest in wondering where she was, and from fretting at what might be happening to her, and worrying about what time she would come back, and how they’d be able to find her if Thomas was taken ill.

Clara stared at him until he moved out of sleep, or the mouth puckered because he could not get free of troubling dreams. She was stricken by a sense of his impermanence, as if at any moment he might stop breathing, or be found not living in the morning, in which case the unity in the family, which even his unwelcome presence had somehow cemented, would be broken for ever. Every live being on earth served its purpose, she thought. Every death reordered the position of those left behind.

Fruit trees blossomed, spheres of pink and white reaching one behind the other as far as the wall, while all beneath was cluttered with nettles and brambles because Percy had dismissed the man who looked after the garden for having taken a few sticks of wood without permission. Percy was too mean to give someone else the job, and when Emma suggested he walk to the nearest dole queue and choose a poor man for the honour, he appeared not to hear. Clara had opened a path with shears but the vegetation grew back to its former density.

White lilac, apple and plum blossom set against sunlight and cloud reminded her that there was nothing they lacked to make life pleasant. They had money, a house, all material things, good health, and yet – Clara turned from the blossom that was so pleasing to the soul – why is it one can cut the misery with a knife?

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Emma, when Clara could not resist voicing her reflections aloud. ‘It’s because we treat each other as if we’ll come to pieces if a cross word is said. I teased father about getting married, but actually did think how good it would be to hear and see another person in the house. Whatever my reasons for having Thomas, one of them was because I wanted to bring a new spirit into the family. I went about it the wrong way, of course. Father would like me to get an upright sanctimonious husband who grovelled with respect for him. So would you. But I couldn’t attach myself to any man for life, even if I thought I loved him. Nothing can be done for us. I can’t stand it here. I was hoping father would throw me out when I went on about him getting married, but he’s too old and soft. He’ll probably just cross me out of his will. He’ll get his own back, somehow, I know he will. There’s only one solution for me.’

‘You’re not going to leave, are you?’

Emma put on her hat at the dressing-table mirror. ‘Do you want me to?’

‘Of course I don’t. But if you’re really fed up you could just take off. With your money you could live anywhere.’

‘I wish I didn’t have it.’

Clara believed her, but such an attitude seemed like an attack on her own existence, and she scoffed: ‘You’d soon wish you had.’

‘You’re so sensible. That’s something else I can’t stand. Suffocating sense! It’s impossible to break out of.’

‘What do you want, then?’

She closed the wardrobe, and surprised Clara by sitting down when she had seemed in a hurry to go out. She needed glasses but hardly ever wore them, and peered into her face. ‘Only one thing.’

‘What?’

‘If anything happens to me, what about Thomas?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, who would look after him?’

Clara wanted to tell her that the maid was doing quite nicely. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you.’

‘But suppose I went out, stepped off the causeway, and got killed by a motor-car, or a tram? Or imagine I died of double-pneumonia.’

‘You’re as strong as a horse. You’ll live to be ninety.’

She spoke coolly, yet Clara saw the distress behind her darkened eyes. ‘I know. I’m asking you to suppose.’

Some other tone must be used, but Clara’s voice overrode the feeble effort she made, and produced a note of impatience. ‘I don’t imagine Thomas would lack the basic necessities. You can depend on that.’

Emma’s face seemed small. She was pleading, but Clara’s pain prevented her guessing the reason. ‘You’re not being sarcastic, are you? I can’t always tell.’

Clara faced her. ‘Do you think we would put the poor little chap on to the street? Really, why talk like this? You’ll have me in tears in a bit, and there’s absolutely no need to.’

‘I know,’ Emma laughed, ‘I can’t bear to see you crying. It’s such a sight: the flower of womanhood in a flood of tears! But I must go. I’m off to the Ritz. I met this wonderful chap, an engineer on leave from the Sudan who doesn’t give a damn about anything in the world. So refreshing. We have marvellous fun. I’d love to bring him here, but I don’t think it would be appreciated. He’d have the place topsy-turvy in no time. Father would have a thousand fits.’

‘What’s his name?’ Clara asked, desperate to know. ‘Let me meet him. I won’t run you off, though we might get on better than you think.’

Emma opened the door. ‘He’s going back soon. They all have somewhere to go back to. He asked me to marry him, but I don’t see how I could. I love Thomas too much to have to put him in an orphanage. No man is worth that.’

Clara held her hands. ‘You sound as if you’re in a bit of a mess. Stay with me this evening. Let’s talk. Why don’t we go to the Riviera for a month or two? There’s a pleasant hotel at Beausoleil we can stay at for a while. Or we can go to Menton. It’s a bit quiet, but there are lots of nice walks, and it’s closer to Italy. Thomas can come with us. We can get two or three rooms. Let’s sit down and discuss it. We can go to Cooks tomorrow, and they’ll arrange everything.’

Even while talking, Clara knew that they couldn’t leave their father – though they might be able to get him looked after if Emma agreed to the plan. Anything to keep her from the obviously horrible man she’d met.

Emma’s expression suggested that she might like the idea, but she said: ‘It’s too late.’

‘How is it?’

‘It just is.’

‘Why?’ Clara looked into her face, smelt her rouge and perfume. ‘You don’t believe what you’re saying. Nothing is ever too late.’

Emma said: ‘It is, though. Too late. Too late for me to believe in anything any more. Everything’s changed. I don’t know when it began, or how it happened. There’s nothing left in my mind. It’s all empty. Unless I’m enjoying myself I’m frightened. Just a dreadful emptiness. At times, too often, I feel there’s nothing there at all. Nothing – nothing. You can’t imagine. I didn’t want to tell you, but now I have.’

She has mother’s spirit, but father’s sickness, and she knows she’s got it, whatever it is or was, Clara thought.

‘But I must go, or I’ll be late.’

And she went out.

Clara felt the despair of the one who always stays behind, and could only soothe her pain by imagining that Emma blamed her for not having suggested the same plan for a holiday weeks ago, when it might have been possible.

She lay much of the night waiting to hear the front door open and shut, and fell into thick dreams towards dawn knowing that Emma hadn’t come home. She was away sometimes for days, so Clara didn’t worry. Yet she was troubled, knowing that Emma was always unhappy when they were absent from each other for very long. The same unease afflicted Clara, which nothing but a curtain of common-sense attitudes on her part could disperse. No matter how unjust, or unfeeling, there was no other way if fate were to be given the free hand that was, finally, impossible to stand up against.

17

There was a certain quality about the air at the demise of spring and the onset of summer, a rich green on the burgeoning vegetation that the year could not possibly show again, a week or two of heavy rain shining on slates and wooden huts in gardens, exposing rails and balustrades that needed paint, and gutters that wanted clearing of dead leaves. Paint crumbled, and the body of iron broke through.

The air was warm, yet the wind could turn chilly, and it was hard to say whether a topcoat or only a mackintosh was necessary on going out. The seemingly quiet streets were in fact full of traffic, the noise subdued because unable to rise in the heavy atmosphere.

In the parks there was a haunting overweight from vivid grass and the branches of laden trees. The sky was in constant alteration, with rarely a pattern of recognizable cloud, and when the sun shone the heat could be fierce if only because of its rarity, but when covered again by banks of cloud the watery air seemed cold.

The fluctuating pressure and temperature put Clara into a state of nervousness that she could hardly control. Such weather made the afternoons long. To fall into a chaos of screaming seemed possible, except that an iron barrier separated her from it. Thomas cried from the nursery, and he stopped when Audrey picked him up. But he cried again. Nothing could soothe him. She had never known him to be such a prolonged nuisance. The day was bad enough without the disturbance of a fractious baby to worsen her headache. She closed the door to her room. He hadn’t grizzled so much since Emma had had him circumcised.

She couldn’t be bothered to wind the gramophone, tried to read another chapter from Vanity Fair, then sat down to begin a letter to her old school friend Lucy Middleton. For the dread she felt, there was little to say. Life was dull, she might write, after her mother’s death. The less to be said, the better for all concerned. She had heard no gossip worth putting in, so why waste the postage to New Zealand simply to say that everything was the same as before? It wasn’t, but there was no point in telling anybody. She lifted the pen out of the ink and wiped its nib on the corner of the blotting paper. She felt too unsettled. A rattle at the window told her it was raining again.

She didn’t know what sort of a bird it was, just a small common feathery thing that settled on a bush and shook itself. The way its wings fluttered and head turned quickly from side to side made her laugh. Such antics! The feathers were quite beautiful. It had crowned itself king (or maybe even queen) of the bush, so what more had it to wish for? Was it a flapper in the sparrow world with a bijou nest under the eaves? It flew away. A policeman and another man were at the gate. They talked, then came towards the door. The window was open an inch or two, and she heard the crumble of their boots on gravel. Unable to move, she watched one of them pull the bell.

The sound made her muscles leap. She cried out, but didn’t care to get up. Perhaps Audrey would. Don’t let it happen, whatever it is. Unhappen it, she said. How stupid! When the jangling stopped, she went with straight back and springing steps to ask the visitors in.

Someone had come to see her. The smile must be bright. She never forgot the shape of her lips that went into that particular smile, nor the lurch of her steps. The day had no ending in her life, but she’d hardly noticed its beginning. Ensuing days became part of grief – which creates its own lunar space, she wrote, so that when the sky is clear you can hardly see into it. And neither will you till your own life ends. Perhaps such heartbreak even precedes and waits for your soul as it comes out of life. Her writing deteriorated, the script impossible to decipher.

The idiot smile persisted as she hammered the dead wood of the study door to wake her father. He suffered deep irritation at being pulled from the centre of his daily nap, and with a weepish expression waited, in slippers and dressing-gown, for an explanation.

She was alone, the onus of everything only on her. ‘They’ve come with news of Emma. She’s been found dead.’

She couldn’t shape the words properly, but took him by the cold hand and pulled him along, making sure he didn’t fall down the stairs. How lucky to be old. She sniffed angrily, trying to calm herself. By a few words the world had changed. Wood on the banister was rougher. A glimpse of conservatory plants through an open door seemed to threaten her. She let go of her father’s arm to shut out the draught, and muttered that she must pull herself together. The tonic of her usual words did no good. Those she had just heard moved into her brain for ever.

The old gentleman didn’t seem able to accept the fact that his daughter had been found dead in a Paddington hotel. To tell anything else would have been to suppose just a little too much, and they weren’t the sort of people who would do so, no matter what your position in the world. She wondered if they didn’t enjoy their reticence. It had been imposed upon them, but they certainly made the best of it. It wasn’t their job to do otherwise. Perhaps it was indeed an accident, but they were trying to find out. They stated that much, that they didn’t know what it seemed, only what they saw. Nothing but scientific conclusions were allowable. They weren’t competent on those lines, the detective sergeant said, to offer any more information.

There were no tears on Percy’s cheeks. She brushed the skin under her eyes and it was also dry. Mustn’t break down in front of them.

‘Is it quite certain?’ Percy’s lips mimicked hers.

The chiming clock released the acid in her by each number. She poured whisky, but none for herself. She didn’t drink, she said. Percy’s glass fell. She picked it up and set it on the mantelshelf where he couldn’t reach it. The bureaucratic finalizing of death would give her much to do. There would be an inquest, and the burial. She hoped it was an accident, and one of the men looked at her. No, no, a thousand times no, I’d rather die than say yes. She fought the words of the common song out of her mind. She used to sing them with Emma when they were children – to annoy their mother. Thinking it permissible, she sat down. If her father slumped she could leap across and catch him. Her calm questions finally made them solicitous. All arrangements would be made. Ten minutes had gone by since the clock had chimed.

She was afraid to look in the mirror in case Emma smiled back. To see even her own reflection would break the strength that being entirely alone gave her. It was a risk she would not take. She could issue orders, and do things, but not with the thought that someone was looking on. Being alone was strength, the more alone the better, for it was easier then to be herself, and if you were as totally yourself as it was possible to be, then you were in control. Nothing could break you down.

But sharp physical pains pierced her, and she fought back the temptation to roar out her soul as she powdered her face and put on her coat and then her hat without looking in the mirror. When she walked to the Green to get a motor cab, in order to go and identify the body, anyone passing on the street would have known that she was not her normal self. Her normal self was tall, blue-eyed, with fair but slightly reddish hair, a proud woman easy to remember and describe. She had been brought up to be, and had always assumed that she was, well-composed and unwilling to feel that any catastrophe could hurt her, though she reflected that it must only have meant those blows directed at someone else. If anything harder than the present blow were to strike she would hope to be conscious only long enough to thank God for it and then die.

18

She recorded the fact that in the midst of death she was in desolation, but rejoiced at the inquest’s conclusion that her sister’s demise was accidental. Emma seemed to have turned on the gas heater and absent-mindedly forgotten to apply a light. There was a willingness to believe such an assumption after the family general practitioner said that, having known her for twenty years, he considered her a normal outgoing person, of whom it was inconceivable to think that the misfortune could have been anything other than an accident. The exoneration helped them to feel that Emma’s carelessness was only another manifestation of her feckless nature. If she had died at home, however much more upsetting it would have been, they might not have been tormented by the suggestion that she had betrayed them after cutting herself off so entirely from help. She did not want to be part of them any more, a feeling that, after the first paralysing weeks, diminished Clara’s gnawing pain.

From one stance she changed to another, would sit hours by the fire – even in the summer it was cold that year – while her mind went through endless conversations with Emma as to what had gone wrong. Talking aloud, she would walk between the door and the window:

‘But she committed suicide, you fool, whatever the coroner decided. Her man friend went back to the Sudan and she couldn’t stand the thought of being alone. Perhaps she was pregnant, and this time didn’t want to be. She was alone because we didn’t mean enough to her. She cared nothing for my support, nor father’s, in the final mood she got into. She’d been in that state ever since I can remember, till her condition became so bad she could do little except find a way out, which must have come easily, whether or not it was an accident. Thank God she didn’t do it at home and take Thomas with her, though it might have been a blessing in disguise if she had.’

But she wept at the thought of all that had not been done to stop Emma dying, though when she wondered what she might have done it was apparent that nothing would have been possible, because the time and place of a person’s death was decided the moment they were born – and with such words she cleared her mind of futile speculation.

Clutching the door handle in order to go out, she could not turn it, and had only the strength to get back to a chair. It was impossible to know whether she stayed a minute or an hour. The days were long, and darkness came late. Then she sprang from her inanition and went out of the room, believing that if she had stayed a moment longer she would have been paralysed for life.

She walked along the hall, and entered her father’s study without knocking. He sat in an armchair, and put the newspaper to his knees on hearing the door knob rattle. She sat on a stool at his feet. ‘I’ve come to talk to you.’

‘I used to read quickly,’ he complained, ‘but I have difficulty fixing my eyes nowadays.’ He took off his wire spectacles and rubbed his forehead. ‘I can’t sleep, either.’ His skin was lined and deadly white, nose thin and bones prominent. Nor did he eat much except porridge, orange juice, or mashed potatoes. Nothing but nursery food. ‘What do you need to talk about?’

She had forgotten, but wanted to be near him because there was no one else. Since Emma’s death she felt a need to be with him, but was afraid of seeming a nuisance. ‘It’ll soon be time for dinner. I thought you might like to come down with me.’

‘I’ll eat in my room,’ he said sharply.

‘I got some Dover sole from the fishmonger this morning, and cook has made one of her marvellous soups.’ She wanted to talk, if only to get a response from a voice not her own. She missed Emma’s. There was no speech, nothing but vague noises of Audrey and cook laughing together, or of the baby that never seemed to stop grizzling.

‘I won’t come down.’

‘I’m not going to eat alone any more in this house,’ she said.

‘Oh, aren’t you?’ He stood up, and took off his dressing-gown. ‘Where’s my collar and tie?’

They were hanging on a chairback. She gave them to him. ‘Shall I help you?’

His hands trembled. He snatched the tie. ‘Get my jacket.’

She found it in his bedroom, and when she came back he had already fastened on his collar and tie.

‘We still have a lot to talk about,’ she said.

‘Have we?’

‘I can’t make every decision myself.’

His small blue eyes, from seeing nothing, glittered acutely. ‘You don’t have to. I make them, in this house. Where’s my tie? I’ve been looking all over, and can’t find it.’

It was not the time to play jokes. ‘You’ve put it on already.’

He sat down, and placed a hand to his throat to make sure she was telling the truth. ‘Did you say there was Dover sole?’

‘And soup. And batter pudding.’ She held out her hand. ‘Come on, father, it’s nearly time.’

‘You go,’ he said. ‘I can manage.’

She walked downstairs to the dining-room, thinking that even if she heard him fall she would not help. He wasn’t even fond of her. He liked no one. All he had was the power of the man in the house, and he enjoyed that, though she was determined he wouldn’t have it much longer. But she was afraid to turn and deride the way he had snubbed her. Her fear of him was as intense as her pride that would not allow her to make one more attempt to become friendly. He blocked himself in, and she locked herself out, but she knew that without being able to speak his thoughts his eyes pleaded for her to come close to him. He was too afraid to ask, and his pride would stop him even if he weren’t. Emma once told her that pride was a sophisticated form of fear. The family was rotten with it, but because it was Clara’s only means of self-respect, and therefore defence, she would guard it jealously. Emma had thrown hers overboard, and look what had happened.

Percy held the spoon high against his chest as if about to beat a tattoo on a drum. The soup steamed. He looked ahead, unable or not willing to move.

‘We mustn’t let our soup get cold.’ It wasn’t possible to begin before he did, though she supposed he might not notice it in his abstracted condition.

He broke his bread and started to eat. The cook had decanted a bottle of burgundy, and Clara filled two glasses.

‘I pour the wine,’ he said. ‘I always do.’

She smiled at his petulance, her mouth wired to stop a cry breaking out. ‘I’ve already done so.’

He hung the napkin from his waistcoat. She reminded him again to begin. When cook took the plates she heard the far-off wail of Thomas from upstairs. Thank goodness for Audrey, who had replaced his mother, but how long could it last? ‘What are we going to do with the baby?’

He spoke, the unexpected precision startling her. ‘He must go to an orphanage. That’s the only place, when there are no proper parents.’

She flushed warmly at such a drastic and outrageous solution, with which she felt in immediate agreement. She couldn’t bring up a child, and Audrey’s plebeian ministrations were only a stopgap. ‘He’s a bit young, isn’t he?’

‘They’ll take him. I know a place. I’ll write to the director and make special arrangements. We’ll pay the bills by the year.’

She had seen him wearing his napkin in such a fashion after coming out of convalescent homes, and then only until Rachel told him to place it on his knees. Let him use it that way. She didn’t mind, except that it gave his aspect an air of childish authority that must have been exercised over him while he was under care. In the present situation he knew exactly what to do, though she was surprised that he would make her share the expense. ‘But is it the right thing to do?’

‘Somebody has to look after him,’ he retorted. ‘Will you bring him up? No. You couldn’t bring up a flower in May. Can I do it?’ He laughed dryly. ‘Soon be dead. So the place where he’ll be cared for, and get a good Christian education, is the Boxwell Orphanage. Never thought I’d need it for this little matter, but they’ll be glad to take him till he’s fifteen, after all I’ve done for them. Then you can find a way for him to earn a living.’

His scornful laugh made her doubt even more that it was right to put Emma’s child into such a place. ‘Isn’t there any other way?’

He was unhealthily excited. ‘Certainly. A very good one. Get a husband, and you can both adopt him.’ He drank half his wine. ‘If your husband’s a good man, he’ll be agreeable.’

Would he have done it? Not damned likely, she told herself. But such problems cleared his brain. Even at his most absentminded he could muster a man’s decisiveness. When they were children he would come back from visiting the orphanage he patronized (she only now heard its name) and say how lucky the inmates were in having found a refuge which did not require them to suffer for the sins of their parents. But Emma, Clara and John felt how awful it must be for such children, and their nanny of the time said that that was where all bad creatures went, and quite right too, because where would the world be if there weren’t such places for them to be hidden away in?

Children knew nothing, made up their own harrowing fears, and trembled at the wicked world of which they had no experience. Thomas would be provided for. Her father reassured her that it was the right thing to do. It was an orphanage, of course, but it was more like a home, certainly a great improvement on the one that he would have if it were possible for him to stay where he was – which it wasn’t. It would be like a boarding school, but starting younger. He would enquire about him now and again, and when the time came she would have to make sure that he was not entirely forgotten. Some time in the future he would be found, no doubt, tractable and presentable, and might spend the occasional weekend with her. She would talk to him, or take him out. She supposed he would be polite, and have lots to say. He would be glad of the change, and grateful to her for giving him some relief to life in an institution. In that sense she would do what she could. When he grew up she would see about a career for him. Her father said that from such places boys went into the army or the navy, or had their passage paid to one of the colonies or dominions. It seemed very suitable. There were no problems because they were trained to expect such arrangements. And what boy in his right mind, however he had been brought up, would want to stay in this country, considering the state things were? He didn’t know how lucky he was going to be.

‘I must get him put in,’ Percy said, ‘before it’s too late.’

‘Too late?’

‘While I’m able to do it. I shan’t live for ever.’

‘Don’t say that.’ To contemplate life alone, and all the shifts of place and spirit that it must entail, was as yet impossible, like looking over a cliff with nothing in the distance, and no sight of the bottom. In spite of his unpleasantness he was all she had, the last tree of familiar safety, and she knew by now that you loved people as much because of their faults as in spite of them.

‘You’re a big silly fool,’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t you know that if you talk of one thing, you must think of another? I’ve left some of my money to a few charities, but most will go to you. I only hope you’ll take good care of it.’

‘I’ll be sure to.’ In a final gesture she touched his hand affectionately, but he pulled it away. If any contact was needed, he would be the one to make it. She felt revulsion now at his instinctive drawing back, shivered as if a cold wind had blown across her. How had her mother put up with this? She hadn’t, really, because she was not the person to do so. But Emma at least said that to offer affection only made him more cruel. You have to bully him and baby him, though to show that you really care, she said, don’t show him that you care in the least.

Perhaps he read her thoughts, for he seemed unable to look at her for a few moments. They were silent while the pudding was served. He tapped the dish with his spoon, each stroke getting louder. She didn’t wait for him to begin, but when he saw she had done so he stopped his maniacal banging and ate rapidly.

His absent-mindedness, and fits of childishness, became more frequent. She couldn’t bear to think of her father existing in a state where she would have to take over her mother’s role and bully him as if he were the child. She had read that old people who turned senile lived longer than those who did not.

He strayed too far on his daily walk, and was found in the street staring at the gutter. He picked up a cigarette packet, took out the picture card, and put it in his pocket. She discovered others in his desk. People round about were familiar with the foibles of this smartly dressed old man who walked along the street looking only in the gutter.

On her way to bed she went into the nursery, where a night-light was left burning. To disturb Thomas would be a blessing, because if he cried Audrey would come from the adjoining room and put him to sleep again. He would like such attention. There would be little enough from now on. Four neatly folded fingers went to his eyes. He turned, and the clean fresh smell of a new world came from his cot. The cot would afterwards go to the attic, though God knew what for. She wouldn’t stay long in that house. The sooner she was out the better. Too much had happened. She would find a flat at some place on the south coast.

His lips curled, and he tried to turn over. Discovering that he couldn’t, he was about to cry. Her large hand held his side, enabling him to complete the manoeuvre. Then he yawned, and seemed to sleep. She was alarmed at how he already looked like Emma. Why had she done all the things she had done? The question was foolish, as questions invariably were that came too late to get an answer. She put out the light and closed the door, feeling better when she had done so, as if her troubles had gone, and left her empty.

19

‘A woman came from the orphanage to collect him,’ Clara wrote on an undated sheet of paper which was folded into the book, ‘and though he didn’t cry – in fact he was quite happy, because he obviously didn’t know what was happening – Audrey did when she had to give him up. If I was sorry to see him go it was only because he was the last of Emma.’

At the bottom of the box was a pack of carefully written receipts for money sent by his grandfather to the orphanage. Tom perceived that at two hundred pounds a year the contributions had been generous, when in those days it must have cost little more than fifty to provide for an inmate at such a place.

The family had kept their obligations, so he could not complain. His career as a seaman hardly allowed him to grumble about any conditions of existence. Nor was he made that way. The fact of being alive, in work, and comfortable enough as an officer at sea was more than sufficient to be grateful for.

It was difficult to claim much connection with this family whose lives had been revealed. Neither, at the moment, did he feel any attachment to his mother. And the younger Clara seemed to have little in common with the formidable and elderly aunt he had seen perhaps two dozen times in his life. But then, he wondered, how much connection do any of us have at fifty with what we were at twenty-five?

In the last box he found a cigarette-card album, with pictures of different series stuck at all angles inside. Flowers, kings, film stars, birds, ships, cricketers and butterflies had been fixed unevenly. He assumed they were cards his grandfather had collected from the streets, and that they had been put there haphazardly by the old man’s hands. But the more he stared the more he knew that he himself had collected them, or begged them, or had been given them at the orphanage. Or he had traded them, because some had worn edges and turned-over corners.

There was a piercing familiarity about the arrangement as he lifted the album from the floor to the table and sat on a chair to look more closely at these colourful and prize possessions of a cloistered infant, a four-year-old’s view on to the outside world. He remembered putting them in one by one as he acquired them, tensing the muscles of hands and fingers to get them straight, with the feeling each time that he had succeeded triumphantly in creating another world whose colours he could walk among.

One day the album vanished, and his days of hope were over. Childhood was knocked down by a hammer-blow, and replaced by the plodding dullness of common survival till the time when he saw ships on the sea from the haven of Clara’s front window, a vision distant and unreal enough for him to believe once more that there might yet be a way to give meaning to his life.

The cigarette-card album must have been taken away and sent to his grandfather, or to Clara, perhaps as proof that he liked being at the orphanage, that he was at home there and making progress in his separate existence. He is happy, they said. Look how he spends his time. Maybe his senile grandfather had visited the place before he died and, watching from a distance, saw the album and coveted it for reasons best not gone into. The director had removed the tattered object from his bedside one night, and posted it to his grandfather next morning. Why else would they have robbed him of the only thing that made life possible?

In the garden of the orphanage was a wooden one-floored building called the Recreation Room, set among trees and apart from the main house, and on wet weekend afternoons they were sent there to be out of the way. The hours between lunch and tea lasted for ever. He had learned early what eternity meant, so that no long watch kept at sea was ever in the least monotonous.

Inside the room was a large table, and an old upright piano with no lid that one of the boys knew how to play, and a few shelves of mildewed penny-dreadful magazines, and adventure novels by Ballantyne, Conan Doyle, Haggard, Henty and Jules Verne. He had stuck his treasured cigarette cards into the album to the sound of rain dripping on to the roof from trees outside, as they sat the afternoon hours away in an intense smell of pungent soot from a chimney place that had once been lit but now never was, and of damp books and half rotting timber that took a decade of sea-life to get out of his spirit.

Their grey felt hats could be distorted into the sort that Napoleon wore. Porridge at breakfast was sometimes burnt, often cold as well. They were taken blackberrying in the autumn, to get sufficient for jam the whole year. Church was twice on Sunday, and there was Scripture every morning. Each summer they lived in tents for a week by the seaside. Occasionally they walked the streets, and felt like kings.

If his grandfather had hoped to punish him by sending him to an orphanage because his mother had committed the unforgivable sin of giving him birth, then the old man had not succeeded. Rather the opposite, Tom supposed, for to be brought up in such a family would obviously have been many times worse. The one blow he had been dealt, which was so savage that he preferred to put it down to an act of God rather than to any that man could have given, was when he had been deprived of his picture-card album. Even that, considering how quickly he had forgotten it, seemed to have concerned another boy and not him.

In any case, there were other blows to smooth the way to forgetfulness. Never, he recalled it being said at the orphanage, sit with your hands clenched – as by the age of six it had grown to be his habit. When he had done so, once too often for his safety, a cane had smashed across his knuckles. From then on his fingers had remained straight, even when relaxed. But who could now say, he thought, remembering such sharp teaching for the first time in years, that they had ever since been at rest?

On the inside of the album it said in Clara’s handwriting: ‘When you think of your mother, say a prayer for her soul.’ Of all he had seen and read in this morass of tormenting mementoes, these words struck his eyes as if to blind him. Rage spread to the very tips inside his fingers, so that his hands would not stay still from pain. He tore the page from its staples, and crushed it like a poisonous spider.