‘You’re here,’ she whispered. Her eyes were shining. She closed the door silently, and came straight to him. She put her hands on his forearms, and then she reached up and kissed him on the mouth.
It was a long kiss, soft-lipped and tasting of strawberries.
Jake almost fainted. When she drew back he croaked, ‘Grace, come here again, please …’ but she was already at the doorway, easing open the door and checking the corridor beyond.
Her lips looked very red, and her smile dazzled him. ‘If I don’t go, Nanny will be down here to find me. But this is a good place, isn’t it? We can meet here again. There’s all the summer, Jake.’
Then she disappeared.
Dinner was interminable. All Jake wanted was to escape to his bed, to think in privacy and silence, but the adults and Hugo seemed disposed to sit with grave faces and talk all night.
‘It must come,’ Dr Harris judged. ‘I cannot see how it can be avoided now that Germany and France have mobilized.’
‘There must not be a war. Think of our poor boys,’ Blanche whispered.
‘If it does come, and I agree with Dr Harris that it must,’ Hugo intoned, ‘then I shall enlist at once. It will be over by Christmas, and I don’t want to miss it.’
‘Hugo, you can’t possibly. You are only sixteen years old.’
‘Almost seventeen, Mama, quite old enough. What do you say, Jake?’
Jake was startled out of his own thoughts, and unreasonably irritated that international events should disturb him now, when there were other things to consider. When there was Grace, with her strawberry mouth …
‘Jake, are you all right?’ Nathaniel asked.
He said stiffly, ‘Perfectly. I don’t believe there should be a war. I don’t believe that men should go out and kill each other over an Archduke or Serbian sovereignty or anything else. There should be some other way, some civilized way. Men should be able to demonstrate that they have higher instincts than animals fighting over their territory.’ He was reminded of the Mammals, and the Pitt-Rivers, and Grace’s breath clouding the glass of the display case. He was made even angrier by the realization that his face and neck were crimson, and that Hugo was eyeing him with superior amusement.
Nathaniel said gently, ‘I think you are right, Jake. But I do not believe that very many people share our views.’
At last the evening was over. Jake escaped to his bed, but there was no refuge in sleep. He lay in the darkness, rigid and sweating, envying Julius’s oblivious even breaths from the opposite bed. He could only think of Grace lying in her own bed, in her white nightgown with her hair streaming out over the pillow, just a few yards away.
She is your cousin, he told himself hopelessly. Almost your sister. But she had come to seek him out in the boot room, and there had been that precious, inflammatory kiss …
Jake groaned in his misery and rolled over on to his stomach. He did not touch himself, although he knew that there were men who did, plenty of them at school. But they had been issued with severe warnings, some more explicit than others, and Jake had been disposed to believe them.
The pressure of the mattress made it worse. He rolled over again and pushed off the blankets so that he only felt the touch of the night air. It was already light when Jake finally fell asleep.
On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia and the first shots of the European conflict were fired.
John Leominster came from London to fetch Blanche. As always when his brother-in-law was at hand, Nathaniel became noticeably more beetle-browed and clever and Germanic. After so many years of marriage the sisters had become adept at defusing the tension between their husbands with inconsequential talk, but on this sombre evening the only real topic was the likelihood of Britain entering the war. After the long-drawn-out family dinner Jake wandered away, but Hugo and John retired with Nathaniel to his study. Nathaniel poured whisky and soda, diluting Hugo’s until it was almost colourless and Hugo blinked in protest.
‘This can’t be easy for you, Hirsh,’ John said.
‘It isn’t easy for any of us. War does not have the reputation of ease.’
‘I meant for you in particular, with your, ah, antecedents.’
John Leominster knew quite well that Levi and Dora Hirsh had settled in Manchester from Bremen in the mid 1860s. Levi was a scientist, an industrial chemist, and he had prospered with England’s manufacturing prosperity. Levi and Dora had family spread across most of Europe, but after fifty years they would not have considered themselves anything but English.
‘My antecedents? I was born here, Leominster. I am as British as you are, my dear fellow.’
It was a favourite tease of Nathaniel’s. Leominster could trace his descent from Henry VII and his pale face darkened with annoyance now. ‘Not quite, but let us not argue about it.’
‘By all means not. More whisky, old chap?’
Hugo held up his glass too. ‘What do you think will happen, uncle?’
Nathaniel sighed, relinquishing the pleasure of baiting Leominster. ‘I think Britain will be at war with Germany in a matter of days. I feel great sadness for Germany and the German people, and for all of Europe. I feel the most sorrow for Jake, and you, even Julius. It will not be a short war, Hugo. You need not be afraid that you will miss it.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I shall join just as soon as I can, in any case.’
John put down his glass. ‘You may enlist when you are eighteen, Hugo, not before. I shall be proud to send you off then.’
Hugo asked eagerly, ‘And Jake? Jake is only seven months younger than I am.’
‘Jake must speak for himself, Hugo. But I understand that he feels as I do, that it should not be necessary for civilized peoples to kill and maim one another’s young men, and to leave a whole generation lying bleeding on some battlefield. I do not believe that Jake will want to go and slaughter his German cousins, and I am ashamed of the politicians and the leaders who will oblige him to make such a decision. I pray that he will have the courage to do what he believes is right, and I am sure he will find a way to be of service to our country.’
Nathaniel stood up, slowly, as if he was tired, and replaced the whisky decanter on the tray on his desk. The top of the desk was a drift of papers covered with his tiny handwriting, and he seemed to gaze longingly at it.
The Lords Leominster and Culmington exchanged glances. ‘And to show the damned Kaiser that Britain means business,’ Leominster muttered.
Nathaniel was still looking at his papers. There was the ordered world of scholarship, beckoning him. He put his hand up to rub his beard around his mouth where grey fronds were beginning to show amongst the wiry black. ‘If you wish,’ Nathaniel said absently.
‘Where is Jake?’ Hugo demanded.
‘I don’t know. I think Jake has problems of his own, just at present.’
Jake was standing at the upstairs landing window, looking down from one of the unpredictable angles of the house to the Woodstock Road below. A gas lamp on top of a tall iron post beyond the gate threw light on the evergreen shrubs beside the gate and tipped the points of the iron railings that bounded the front garden. A cyclist swooped silently past, and for an instant the street lamp laid a monster’s wavering shadow on the road before him.
Jake was not thinking about the war, or reflecting on duty and service to his country. He was wondering what his cousin Hugo did in circumstances like his own. Hugo was fond of hinting that he was a man of the world, but Jake couldn’t work out what that meant. He didn’t know either whether it was more Culmington nobly to resist temptation and think