They met Nathaniel at the bottom of the stairs. He had shrugged himself into his light summer coat, and carried his panama hat in one hand and a leather bag full of papers in the other.
‘We’re going to Pitt-Rivers, Grace has chosen. Where are you going, Pappy?’
‘Into College, just for an hour. If you would like, I will meet you at Pitt-Rivers and we can walk in the Parks.’
‘Yes, yes we can do that. Only don’t forget about us as soon as you get to College and sit there for hours and hours, will you?’
‘I’ll try not to,’ Nathaniel said, not denying the possibility.
They left the house and walked towards the city, through the patches of shade cast by the big trees lining the road and out into the sunshine again. Nathaniel walked quickly, taking long strides, but the children easily kept pace with him. When they came to the red-and-yellow bulk of Keble, with its chapel looking – as Clio always said – like some animal on its back with its legs in the air, they turned into Parks Road and Nathaniel left them.
The Pitt-Rivers loomed across the road. They hurried over to the arched entrance and the yawning attendant in his booth nodded them in. They passed through the door and into the museum.
The smell descended around them. It was compounded of dust, formaldehyde, and the exudations of rumbling hot-water pipes, animal skins and bones, and mice. The air was thick from being long enclosed, and the dim light hardly illuminated the exhibits in their glass cases. The silence was sepulchral.
The cousins breathed in; looked up into the wooden galleries rising above their heads where the occasional shuffling don might be glimpsed, and fanned out ready to make their tour of inspection.
They had been visiting the museum ever since they were old enough for Nathaniel to bring them, on wet winter afternoons when their woollen hats and mufflers steamed gently and added to the miasma. It had been an outing, a place where Nathaniel told stories sparked off by the sight of a gruesome shrunken head or a decorated shield, a mysterious treasure cave remote from the humdrum Oxford, and for Grace a source of information that she secretly gathered to herself. Grace knew about the earth’s mineral deposits because she had learnt the display labels beside the glittering chunks of quartz and mica and haematite.
Later, when they were a little older, Pitt-Rivers had become a place of refuge away from the house. No one ever objected to their making the short walk to the museum. They had drifted between the tall cabinets, peering in at the jumble of trophies within and then at their own reflections in the murky glass, waiting for something to happen.
Each of them had their favourite exhibits and they visited them in ritual order, jealously checking to make sure that each item of the display was intact. Jake liked the Mammals, a small collection of stuffed arctic foxes and ermines and skunks with mothy hides and bright glass eyes, their stiff legs and yellow claws resting on wooden plaques garnished with little fragments of tundra. Julius preferred the Story of Man, a Darwinian series of tableaux culminating in Modern Man, a wax dummy complete with bowler hat and starched collar. Clio headed for the Dinosaurs, peering upwards through the ark of a rebuilt rib-cage and sighing over the great empty skulls.
Grace’s favourite was Geology, considered very dry by the others. She could stand for hours looking at the black slabs stained with ochre iron, at polished golden whorls and salty crystals, and at an egg of grey rock split to reveal the lavender sparkle of raw amethyst.
She found that her rocks were all in their places, the labels beside them only a little yellower and the spidery handwriting fading into paler sepia. She rested her forehead against the glass, transfixed by the mathematical purity of hexagonal prisms of quartz. She was thinking that her mother’s diamonds came from the same source, from rocks like these chipped out of the deep ground somewhere. Grace liked the diamonds although they would be worn by Hugo’s wife, not her, but she preferred these other crystals still half embedded in their native rock. They gave her a vertiginous sense of the earth’s prodigality, her own smallness in comparison.
She was still leaning her head against the case when Jake came up behind her. He stood at her shoulder, looking down at the eternal display of stones. Then he shifted his gaze to Grace’s hair, a thick ringlet of it lying over her shoulder, and the lines of her cheek and jaw. He saw that her breath made a faint mist on the glass. He reached up with his finger and touched the haze, and it seemed such an intimate part of Grace herself that the blood suddenly hammered in his ears and he opened his mouth to suck in the thinned air.
With the tip of his finger in the mist Jake traced the letter G.
Grace turned to look at him then with colour in her face that he had never seen before. Jake felt as if a fist had struck him in the chest, but he looked steadily back at her. He saw the faint bronze flecks in the brown of her eyes.
Something had happened, at last.
Then they heard Clio calling them in the sibilant whisper that stood for a proper shout in the vaults of Pitt-Rivers. ‘Grace, Jake? Where are you? We’ve been here for an hour. Pappy will be waiting.’
‘We had better go,’ Grace said.
Jake stumbled after her, blinking, out into the July sunshine.
Nathaniel was sitting on a low wall reading a newspaper. His panama hat was tipped forward to shield his eyes from the sun and his leather bag stood unregarded at his feet.
They called to him, ‘Pappy, Uncle Nathaniel, we’re sorry to keep you waiting, don’t be vexed …’
Nathaniel did not look up. He was reading intently, his thick eyebrows drawn together and the corners of his mouth turned down in the springy mass of his beard.
‘Pappy …’
He did look up then. He was still frowning but he folded the newspaper carefully into its creases, smaller and smaller still, and poked it away out of sight between the books and papers in his bag.
‘Here you all are,’ he said, tipping his hat back as if he was glad of the distraction they provided. His frown disappeared a moment later and he stood up, swinging the bag over his shoulder by its leather strap and holding out his other arm to Grace. ‘Is everyone ready? Then off we go.’
They turned through the big iron gates into the University Parks. There was a vista of heavy-headed trees and smooth grass, and flowerbeds subsiding into high-summer exhaustion. The scent of mown lawns was welcome after the thick atmosphere of the museum.
‘We should have called in for Tabby and Alice,’ Nathaniel said. He enjoyed having all his children around him. ‘They love the Parks.’
‘No, not the Babies,’ the older ones groaned.
Grace walked with her arm in Nathaniel’s, chattering to him. Clio and Julius and Jake walked close behind, following their shadows over the grass. Jake felt as if his eyes and ears had been suddenly opened. The colours were almost painfully vivid, and he could hear bees humming, even the splash of the river over the rollers beyond Parsons’ Pleasure. He struggled to listen to what the twins were saying, and to frame ordinary responses.
They came to the river rippling under a high arched footbridge. Clio and Julius ran up the steep slope of the bridge and hung over the metal railing to peer into the depths. When they were small they had dropped stones, and twigs to race in the winter currents. Today the river was sluggish, deep green in the shade of the willows. Jake caught the whiff of mud and weed.
Nathaniel said, ‘If you would like to walk up to the boathouse, we could take out a punt.’
Clio and Jake were enthusiastic. Punting was always popular with the Hirshes, and on a hot afternoon it was pleasant to lie back on cushions and glide over the water. Only Grace said nothing, and Julius was quiet too, observing her. Nathaniel led the way along the river path under the branches of the willows, to the point where the punts were tied up. The boatman scrambled across the raft of them, setting the boats rocking and the water slapping