‘It is too big,’ Nathaniel protested. ‘All these rooms, just for us and Jakie and his nurse and a couple of maids. We need more children, Eleanor. We need to fill up the house. I want a dozen children, a whole team, a chamber orchestra.’
Eleanor laughed at him. ‘A dozen? How will we feed them all?’
The Hirshes had very little money.
‘Leave that to me. I shall be Professor Hirsh before you know it.’
Eleanor didn’t doubt it. She was proud of her husband’s growing academic reputation, and she was glad to see the students who began to flock to their house to hear him talk.
‘A chamber orchestra it shall be then,’ she agreed with mock obedience. Nathaniel loved music almost as much as he loved books.
In the next year Eleanor made a long summer visit to Stretton, taking Jake with her, and the sisters sat tranquilly in the shade of Capability Brown’s trees with their babies beside them. Blanche came to Oxford in her turn, and discovered how much she enjoyed the Hirshes’ unconventional domestic life after the formalities of Stretton. Eleanor often forgot to order food; the Irish cook was no more reliable; Nathaniel could turn up with two or twenty hungry undergraduates at any hour of the day; but the odd corners of the red-brick miniature castle were full of the twins’ laughter all through Blanche’s visit.
Their only regret was that their husbands would never be friends. John Leominster was courteous, but he clearly regarded Nathaniel as a dangerous barbarian. And where Eleanor had made gentle fun of her brother-in-law, Nathaniel’s jokes were sharper, rooted in his mistrust of the English aristocracy itself. But both men liked to see their sisters-in-law, and Eleanor and Blanche contented themselves with that much.
Towards the end of 1900, when Jake was well out of babyhood and Nathaniel was beginning to be anxious and impatient, Eleanor discovered that she was expecting another child. Her husband’s delight at the news touched her deeply, and she remembered his wish to be the father to an entire orchestra. She could only be pleased for Nathaniel’s sake when her doctor told her a little later that she should prepare for twins. The news was no great surprise. There were generations of twins in the Earley family.
‘Twins!’ Nathaniel exclaimed. ‘A pair of violinists for the Bach Double Concerto.’ Eleanor had never seen him look so happy.
‘And two more children to read their way through some of these books. Jake will never manage it alone,’ she told him.
An added satisfaction was that Blanche was pregnant again too.
The weeks of the second pregnancy passed slowly. Eleanor grew so large that she could hardly move. She sat in her garden through the spring and into the early summer, watching Jake play and waiting for news from Blanche, whose confinement was expected before her own.
Then, early in the morning of Midsummer’s Day 1901, almost a month before she had expected it, Eleanor went into labour. The twins, a black-haired boy and girl, were born that afternoon within fifteen minutes of each other. They were small babies, but perfectly healthy. Nathaniel knelt by his wife’s bedside, crying tears of gratitude.
That evening, the news reached the Woodstock Road that Blanche had given birth to a daughter. She had been born at midday, two hours before the Hirsh twins, at the Leominsters’ town house in Belgrave Square.
All three deliveries had been quick and uncomplicated once again. Unlike poor Constance, the Holborough girls with their stately, ample figures were excellent breeders.
Eleanor lay weakly back against her pillows, half dazed with exhaustion and relief and happiness. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, over and over again. ‘My daughter, and Blanche’s, born on the very same day.’
‘You don’t have to believe anything,’ Nathaniel said sternly. ‘Rest is all you have to do.’
The three babies were christened together at the house in Belgrave Square. The girls were given each other’s names, as well as their aunts’ and the new Queen’s. Their mothers had no doubt that their old communion would be passed on to the new generation. Lady Grace Eleanor Alexandra Clio Stretton and Miss Clio Blanche Alexandra Grace Hirsh would share everything that their mothers had shared. Julius Edward, the real twin, was after all a boy, and boys were different.
‘They will be more than friends and more than sisters,’ Blanche said, leaning over the cradles to look at the tiny faces.
‘Twins,’ Eleanor answered, her voice full of affection. ‘Like us.’
Clio lay on her back on her bed, her knees drawn up, following with her eyes the pattern of cracks in the ceiling. She was listening to the familiar sounds of the house, disentangling the various layers as they drifted up to her attic bedroom.
Closest to hand was the sound of Julius practising. He ran up a scale and down again, up and down, the chains of notes left hanging in the air to be overtaken by their successors. Clio knew that he would be standing with his eyes shut, his face closed with concentration and his black hair falling over his forehead as the bow dipped and rose. As she listened the scale stopped and Julius launched into a piece of Bach. Clio nodded and folded her hands behind her head.
From below her, in the nursery, she could hear Alice begin to cry, and then the creaking footsteps of Nanny Cooper crossing the room to pick her up, or retrieve her ball, or whatever it was that she needed.
The baby Alice was only two years old, the last-born of the Hirsh children. The next-youngest, Tabitha, had been born in 1910, when the twins were already nine and Nathaniel had long given up hope of his chamber orchestra. After the twins Eleanor had suffered two miscarriages, and had been sure that there was no hope of another child. But then Tabitha had come, a big, contented baby who lay in her crib and smiled at the world, and two years later Alice arrived. Alice never seemed to sleep or to rest and she had a shrill, frequent cry, but she was also endlessly inquisitive and resourceful in comparison with her placid sister. Nathaniel loved all his children, but he knew that Alice was almost certainly the last baby and she was his adored favourite. It was Alice he looked for first, after Eleanor, when he came into the house, and he had infinite patience with her. In return Alice would do anything Nathaniel wanted her to, even go to sleep, whilst refusing the overtures of everyone else in the family.
There were two younger children in the Stretton family too, Thomas and Phoebe, born four and seven years after the arrival of Grace. But all the younger children, cousins and siblings from Thomas right down to Alice, were always impatiently dismissed by the older ones as the Babies. For Jake and Julius and Clio and Grace only reckoned with themselves, or with Hugo as an occasional extra.
Downstairs, Alice’s screaming stopped abruptly. Nanny must have done something to pacify her. Clio strained to discern the other more distant noises. A door opened somewhere, and Clio thought she could just catch the click click of her mother’s heels across the coloured tiles of the hall. She would be walking quickly from her drawing room to Nathaniel’s study, perhaps with an armful of flowers from the garden, or the post to put on the corner of her husband’s desk. Clio smiled. At the heart of the house there was an absence of noise, the silence of Nathaniel working. He would be sitting at his desk or in the decaying armchair beside it, his beard sunk on his chest and his reading spectacles pinching the bridge of his nose. When he took the spectacles off he would massage the reddened place where they had rested.
The other noises were the ordinary sounds of the house in the Woodstock Road. The wood panelling and the floorboards creaked and protested under so many feet. The metallic rattle might be one of the two housemaids carrying an enamel jug of hot water to the nursery. The muffled thumping could be Jake descending the stairs, or Tabby banging her wooden blocks, or Mr Curler the handyman performing some repair job