But then the skull-head jerked up again, and the surprisingly bright eyes flicked to her. ‘Such a lot of years, eh? Why are you interested in so much long-ago, forgotten nonsense?’
‘It’s my trade,’ Elizabeth answered, ‘I’m a biographer.’
The pity was still with her and she could not make herself say, ‘your biographer’.
Blanche turned her back on the mocking optimistic faces. She looked around the shadowy saloon again, up at the great glass chandelier that had been swathed in burlap, and at the ghostly shapes of gilt chairs and console tables under their dust-sheets.
The huge house seemed already dead. The clocks had been allowed to run down and not even their ticking disturbed the silence. Blanche imagined that she could hear the dust settling.
In September 1916 John Leominster had decided that it was his patriotic duty to free as many men as possible from his house and estate to help with the war effort. From the outbreak of the war the house had been run by a minimum of staff, but now Stretton was being entirely closed up. The land and the farms would be left in the care of a manager who would oversee the growth of food crops, and the family was migrating to London, to the Belgrave Square house.
‘You have done a very good job, Mrs Dixey, you and the men.’
The butler and two of the footmen, all too old for active service, were accompanying the family to Belgrave Square. Mrs Dixey and her husband, in their quarters at the far end of one wing, would be left as the sole guardians of a hundred lifeless rooms.
‘Thank you, my lady,’ Mrs Dixey said.
They hesitated, unbalanced for an instant in their familiar relation to each other by this dislocation of the house. The housekeeper saw the expression in Blanche’s eyes and understood it, because two of her own boys were in France. She wanted to put out her hand to touch her employer’s arm and say, ‘God will watch them for us.’ But she knew her place too well and stood silently instead, waiting to see if there would be any more instructions.
Blanche sighed. John was waiting for her in his office. ‘I think that will be all,’ she said. She crossed beneath the portrait without looking at it and walked slowly back over the thin bars of light.
John was sitting at his desk, staring into the pigeonholes with their neat sheaves of paper, but when Blanche came in his face lightened. He stood up and put out his hands to rest on her shoulders, then drew her closer to him. Blanche let her head droop until it rested against him. They stood still, finding comfort in one another.
Blanche and John had not founded their marriage on words, because John had never been able to express his thoughts or feelings. Instead, Blanche had learnt to interpret the different languages of their silence. She knew that he heard her fear, and shared it with her. She began to cry helplessly, her face pressed against the rough tweed of his coat.
Upstairs in the schoolroom, Grace was sitting alone on the floor. Nanny had taken eight-year-old Phoebe away to the nursery, to select whatever books and toys must be packed up and sent by the carrier to the London house. She had given Grace instructions to prepare her own belongings, as well as Thomas’s, who had returned to his prep school.
But Grace had not even opened the doors of any of the tall, brown-varnished cupboards that lined the room. She sat in a patch of sunlight with her legs stretched out in front of her, scanning the familiar surroundings.
At the old desk she had sat to listen to Miss Alcott, or one of her predecessors, stifling her yawns over the atlas or the French grammar. She wondered, if all the minutes were added together, how many hours of her life she must have spent staring out of the window, over the trees of the park towards the brown hills.
When they were both very small, she had had Hugo for company. But then Hugo had gone away to school, and all through the long termtimes she had suffered the governess alone. She had always hated her isolation and the unfairness of what she considered to be her imprisonment. The Babies had been no consolation. Even now, at eleven, Thomas was no more than an infuriating little boy.
Grace smiled suddenly. The holidays had been different. The holidays had always meant the Hirsh cousins, and when they were all at Stretton this room had been their headquarters.
She scrambled to her feet now, and went over to the desk. It had a sloping wooden seat, worn shiny, connected to the desk part by braces of cast iron. The metal had been rubbed shiny too, by her own restless feet. Grace lifted the white china inkwell out of its round hole and turned it upside down. The ink had dried out, and Miss Alcott was gone. Grace was fifteen, and she was finished with the schoolroom.
She lifted the lid of the desk. One wet afternoon Jake had carved his initials with a penknife. She could see his face now, his tongue protruding slightly as he worked and a thick lock of black hair falling into his eyes. Grace ran her fingertips over the JNH. The letters were deep, and even. Julius had taken the knife from him after that. JEH was fainter, scratched rather than carved, but with curlicues extending from the arms of the H. Grace followed the flourishes of them with her fingernail, her eyes half closing.
After that it had been the girls’ turn. They had bickered about who was to go first, and then they had carved their semi-alphabets with laborious care. GEACS and CBAGH. Clio’s carving was better than her own, Grace saw now.
When the initials were all complete Jake had taken a pair of dividers and scratched a circle to enclose them all, the magic circle.
‘Grace? What are you doing?’
It was Nanny, calling from the nursery. Very gently, Grace traced the circle and then she lowered the desk lid, hiding the carvings once more.
‘Packing,’ she answered.
Grace didn’t want to move to London. The London house was gloomy, and the rush of the city outside seemed only to emphasize her isolation within it. Grace understood her own position perfectly well. She was too old for the schoolroom and too young to go out in Society, even the restricted version of Society that was all the war allowed. She knew that she was facing a prospect of suitable war-work under Blanche’s supervision; days of packing dressings for the Red Cross, or knitting socks, with walks in Hyde Park and tea with the daughters of Blanche’s friends regarded as adequate diversions.
Grace wished she had been born a boy. Then she could go to the front, like Hugo. She was quite sure that Hugo would come home again, so certain of it that she did not even bother to try to define why. He would come home, probably with a medal, and all the glory would be heaped on him.
There was no glory in rolling bandages. There was no glory, Grace thought, in any of the things she might do.
She wandered to the window and looked down. The trees showed the first yellow and ochre of autumn. Soon the frosts would come and there would be the scent of woodsmoke and apples, but she would be in London looking out into Belgrave Square.
It isn’t fair. I wish I were someone else.
It was a new sensation, for Grace, to be dissatisfied with her position in life. Until now she had always felt able to direct matters to suit herself, to arrange the world according to her own requirements. But she understood suddenly how small the world of her childhood had been, and realized that she was about to exchange that world for an adult one, no bigger and circumscribed by propriety and convention.
Grace lifted one fist and banged it against the glass of the schoolroom window. Then, out loud, she said the worst word she knew. The pointless syllable fell away into silence.
‘When will this war be over?’ she demanded of the empty room. She meant, When will everything else begin? Impatience budded inside her like an ulcer.
‘Grace, you haven’t done one single thing.’
In the doorway, Phoebe appeared and Nanny Brodribb behind her, standing with her hands