‘Please, Broddy, will you start on it for me? I don’t know where to begin. I just want to go downstairs for five minutes and then I’ll be back, I truly promise.’
‘Will you, now?’
Grace went, leaving Phoebe clicking her tongue in imitation of Nanny. ‘Grace is very lazy,’ she heard her say.
The marble stairway that circled under the central dome was littered with woodshavings, curled like severed pigtails, and the wide marble expanse of the floor below was cluttered with boxes. An old man in a green baize apron was labelling each crate. Grace loved Stretton and had never considered that it would not stay the same for ever. She hated to see it dismantled like this, being packed away like a Whit Monday fairground.
She found her parents in her father’s study. As she hesitated at the door and saw them turn away from each other it occurred to her that they might have been embracing. The notion was embarrassing, and she forgot it as quickly as she could. She also saw that Blanche had been crying. The tears were for Hugo, of course. Grace shrugged, awkwardly, wanting to reassure her out of her own fund of certainty that Hugo would not be killed, but there was something in her mother’s defeatism that irritated her and diffused her sympathy.
‘Yes, Grace, what is it?’ John said. He had never been easy with his daughters.
As meekly as she could, Grace asked, ‘I wondered if I might go to Oxford, to be with Clio. Instead of staying by myself in London?’
John was never in favour of other people’s suggestions, particularly his children’s, and he stared at her now as if she had suggested removing to Australia. ‘What can you mean? You will not be by yourself. Your mother and I will be there, and your sister, and Thomas in the school holidays. As well as the rest of the household.’
Blanche looked at her daughter. She had expected that Grace would grow up to be calm and controlled, and pliant where necessary, but Grace was none of those things. She was eager and strong-willed, and so full of impatience and the taste of her own needs that Blanche was sometimes afraid she might split her own skin, showing the soft pulp beneath like a ripe fruit.
‘I think Aunt Eleanor has enough to worry about.’
Except that her sons were safe. Jacob had kept to his declaration of pacifism. He had deferred his entry into medical school and was serving in France as an orderly in a field hospital. Julius was on the point of entering the Royal College of Music.
‘She wouldn’t need to worry about me. Perhaps I could help her. Perhaps I could even go to Clio’s school for a few months. Until the war is over.’
‘I don’t know,’ Blanche said.
Grace did. She also knew when to save her ammunition. She smiled acquiescently now. ‘Well, perhaps,’ she said. She went back upstairs to the big brown cupboards and began laying out her own possessions and Thomas’s ready for transporting to London and Oxford.
Julius and Clio sat on a bench underneath the walnut tree in the garden at Woodstock Road. They were reading, and they sat turned inwards towards each other, their profiles identically inclined over their books. Grace had no book, and she had already walked the flagged paths between Eleanor’s flowerbeds.
‘You are very lucky,’ Grace said to Clio. ‘Do you know how lucky you are?’
The twins looked up at her, and it seemed to Grace that they smiled the same patient smile.
Grace had never felt jealous of Clio before. She had envied her the relative freedom of life in the Oxford house, and the constant company of her brothers, and her easy confident store of knowledge, but she had never before thought that it would be preferable to be Clio Hirsh than to be Lady Grace Stretton.
But now, it seemed, Clio had everything that she did not.
Jake was no longer at home, of course, but Clio still had Julius, and the bond between the twins had strengthened since Jake had gone away. When Blanche set her free at last, on a long visit to the Oxford family, Grace had plenty of time to observe her cousins. Watching them, seeing how comfortable they were together and how they seemed to know without speaking what the other was thinking, Grace felt her own solitude like an affliction. She wished that she could share the same intimacy with someone.
She found herself reaching out to Clio, on this visit, as she had never done before.
Without even admitting it to herself, Grace had begun to dismantle the old barriers. She stopped trying to be better, or quicker, or louder, and she started to follow Clio’s lead. She wanted to be like a sister, like a third twin to Clio and Julius, instead of merely sharing the accident of a birthday.
Since the beginning of the war Clio had grown up and away from Grace, who knew she had done no more than mark time in the schoolroom at Stretton. Unlike Grace, with her undirected impatience and energy, Clio had acquired a sense of purpose. Encouraged by Nathaniel she had decided that she wanted to study for an Oxford degree in modern languages, and was planning to enter one of the women’s halls. She worked hard at her books, making Grace feel stupid and aimless in comparison.
Clio also had useful practical work to do. The house in the Woodstock Road was no longer filled with a stream of undergraduates coming to visit Nathaniel and to sit talking and arguing until Eleanor fed them. Most of the students had been swallowed up by the war and those few who remained were quieter and more jealous of their time. The house had seemed unnaturally empty and quiet until Eleanor had offered it as a convalescent home for wounded officers.
The men came in twos and threes, physically more or less repaired but in need of rest, and comfort, and security. Eleanor and Clio nursed them, but they also talked and read to them, and Julius played chess, and Tabby and Alice ran in and out of their rooms, and so the men were drawn into the family. They seemed to thrive in the warmth of it. Each time one of them became well enough to leave, the Hirshes said goodbye with as much affection as if he were a son or a brother.
Grace saw all this, and she admired it. She was always clear-sighted enough to know what was worthy of approval. She was generous in her open admiration of Clio, and Clio responded to her generosity.
For the first time Clio became the leader and arbiter, and in a matter of days she lost the layers of her own resentment and jealousy of Grace that had built up over all their years together. They became friends, knowing that they had never truly been friends before.
‘Why am I so lucky?’ Clio asked, still smiling. ‘I’ve got three pages of French translation to do, and an essay on Robespierre, and there’s an ink stain in the front of the skirt of my good dress.’
‘You’re a Hirsh, and a twin,’ Grace answered seriously.
They both knew how impossible such an acknowledgement would have been only a few months ago.
Clio slid sideways on the garden bench, drawing up her serge skirt to make room, and held out her hand to Grace.
‘You’re a Stretton. Sursum corda,’ she said. ‘Lift up your hearts’ was the Stretton family motto, and the cousins considered it appropriately Culmington. ‘And you are a twin.’
Julius had put his book down and he moved to one side too as Grace sat between them. He put his arm across her shoulder and Grace leant back, resting her head against the sleeve of his coat. She sighed, and then turned her face so that she could look up at him.
‘Am I, Julius?’
Julius contemplated the sheen of her pale skin, and the fine hairs at the tail end of her eyebrow, and the small vertical cleft beneath her lower lip that she had inherited from her father, and he knew that he loved her as much as he loved Clio, and that she filled a space in his life that was not sisterly at all, but much more intriguing and enchanting. He could not remember even how long he had loved her, but he knew the roots of it went a long way back, and deep within him, and that the love was very important to him, but it carried no sense of threat because he knew it was immutable.
‘Is that really what you want to