Then, in a stronger voice, Clio suddenly said, ‘I remember my Aunt Blanche’s scent. White lilac, and burnt hair. They frizzed their hair, you know, in those days. With curling tongs that the maid heated red-hot in the fire. I remember the smell of burning hair.’
Elizabeth pressed the record button, and then sat quietly, listening as Clio talked. This was the pattern of her visits.
The old woman sat propped in her nest of cushions and rugs. Her hands rested like small ivory carvings on the rubbed velvet arms of the chair. The visitor waited, watching her to see if she would doze, or sit in silence, or if today would be a talking day.
Clio said to Elizabeth, not looking at her but away somewhere else, a long way off, ‘I remember the holidays. There were always wonderful holidays.’ She tilted her head, listening to something that reminded her.
When she thought about it, she supposed that had been Nathaniel’s doing. Nathaniel applied the same principles to holidays as to his work. He could turn the radiance of his enthusiasm equally on the business of enjoyment or the pleasures of academic discipline. And Nathaniel’s enthusiasm infected them all, all of his children. When the time came for the family migrations, excitement would fill the red-brick house with high-pitched twittering, like real birds. Clio could hear the starlings out in the garden now. It must be their chorus that had taken her back. The nurse would have tipped the crusts of the breakfast toast on the bird-table.
‘Where did you go?’ Cressida’s daughter Elizabeth asked.
‘Different places.’ Clio glanced at her, suddenly sly. ‘Grace and the others used to come with us, too.’ It amused her to see how the mention of Grace sharpened the other’s attention. It always did.
There had been different holidays, but almost always beside the sea. They would take a house, or two houses, if one was not big enough for Hirshes and Strettons together, with their retinue of nursemaids and attendants. The children and their mothers would stay there all the long summer, and the two fathers would visit when they could.
Only they almost never came at the same time. Nathaniel would go away for some of those summer vacations on reading parties with his undergraduates, or on visits to Paris and Berlin. And John Leominster had the estate at Stretton to attend to, and business in London, and the affairs of his club.
It was Blanche and Eleanor who were always there.
Clio and Grace and the boys ran over the expanses of rawly glittering sand, or hung over the rock pools, or dragged their shrimping nets through fringes of seaweed before lifting them in arcs of diamond spray to examine the catch. It was the mothers they always ran back to, to show off the mollusc or sidling crab, Jake pounding ahead with Julius at his heels, and shoulder to shoulder, the two girls, with their skirts gathered up in one hand and their sharp elbows sticking out. If one of them could manage a dig at the other, to make her swerve or miss her footing, then so much the better. It would mean reaching the boys first, having the chance to blurt out with them the news of the tiny discovery, while the loser came sulkily behind, forced to pretend that nothing mattered less.
The two nannies sat with the nursemaid in a sheltered corner at the top of the beach. The little brothers and sisters, Hirshes and Strettons, played at their feet or slept in their perambulators. These babies were beneath the attention of the bigger children. The flying feet swept past, sending up small plumes of silvery sand, heading for the mothers.
Blanche and Eleanor sat a little distance apart, beneath a complicated canvas awning. They were protected from the sun and the sea breeze by panels of canvas that unrolled from the roof-edge. The little pavilion was carried down to the beach every morning and erected by Blanche’s chauffeur, who also brought down their canvas chairs and spread out the rugs on which they rested their feet. One year Hugo Stretton had made a red knight’s pennant to fly from the top of the supporting pole. This spot of scarlet was the focus of the beach, however far the children wandered. The twin sisters sat beneath it in the canvas shade, watching their families and mildly gossiping. Sometimes there was a husband nearby, either Nathaniel Hirsh, with his black beard bristling over a book, or John Leominster, bowling at Hugo who stood in front of a makeshift wicket and squinted fiercely at the spinning ball. But if neither husband was there, Blanche and Eleanor were equally content. They found one another’s company perfectly satisfactory, as they had always done.
It was always Jake who reached them first.
‘Look at this, Mama, Aunt Blanche. Look what we found.’
Then Julius would plunge down into the sand beside him. ‘I found it. It came up in my net.’
And one of the girls would drop between the two of them, panting for breath and grinning in her triumph. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Can we keep it for a pet? I’ll look after it, I promise I will.’
The second girl would stumble up, red-faced and pouting. ‘Don’t be silly, you can’t keep things like that for pets. They aren’t domestic,’ Clio would say scornfully, because it was the only option left open to her. It was usually Clio. Grace was quicker and more determined in getting what she wanted. She usually won the races. It isn’t fair, Clio had thought, almost from the time she had been able to think. Jake is my brother and Julius is my twin. They’re both mine, Grace is only an outsider.
But Grace never behaved like an outsider, and never behaved as if she owed her Hirsh cousins any thanks for her inclusion in their magic circle. She took it loftily, as her right.
The children knelt in a ring, at their mothers’ feet. Jake put his hand into the net and lifted out their catch to show it off. Blanche and Eleanor bent their identical calm faces and padded coiffures over him, ready to admire.
One of them gave a faint cry. ‘It is quite a big one. Don’t let it nip you, Jacob, will you?’
Hugo was digging in the sand nearby. His curiosity at last overcame him and he left his complicated layout of moats and battlements and strolled over to them, his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers.
‘It’s only a stupid crab,’ he observed.
‘Stupid yourself,’ Clio and Grace rounded on him, united in defence. ‘Just because you didn’t catch it.’
‘I wouldn’t have bothered. It’ll die in five minutes, in this sun.’
Hugo turned his back on them, returning to his solitary game. Hugo was Grace’s elder brother. He was good as an extra player in field games, or for Racing Demon, or to perform the less coveted roles in the rambling plays that Clio and Julius wrote, but he never belonged to the circle. There was room for only the four of them within it.
Hugo would have said, ‘I’m not interested in stupid clubs. They’re for little girls.’
Knowing better, none of them would have bothered to contradict him.
Eleanor or Blanche would say, soothingly, ‘It is very handsome. Look at those claws. But I think Hugo may be right, you know. It will be happier under a rock, somewhere near the water. Shall I walk over there with you, so we can make sure it finds a safe home?’
Then, whichever mother it happened to be would stand up, smoothing the folds of her narrow bell skirt and the tucked and pearl-buttoned front of her white blouse. If it was a hot day she would shake out the folds of her little parasol and tilt it over her dark head, before following them across the shimmering sand. The hem of her skirt trailed on it, giving a rhythmic, languid whisper. The mothers’ feet were always invisible, even beside the sea. Even though she knew Blanche really wore elegant narrow shoes in suede or glacé kid, Grace used to imagine that her mother’s gliding step was the result of wheels, smoothly revolving beneath her rustling gowns.
When they came to the rocks the children hunched together, watching as Jake slowly opened his hands and laid the crab in the narrow slice of shade. The creature