‘No,’ Grace said seriously. ‘It was wonderful.’ She meant it, and he heard it in her voice, and he crooked his arm around her shoulders again.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Empty of the music, the room seemed very silent. They stood side by side, next to the window, looking down into the garden. Clio’s bent head was visible beneath the walnut tree at the far end, and beyond her were the trees of other gardens with bare branches beginning to poke through their faded summer covering, and the gables and slate roofs and brick chimneys of North Oxford. Grace liked the domesticity of this view, after the emptiness of Stretton Park and the grimy, pompous expanse of Belgrave Square. It amused her to imagine the blameless academic lives that were lived behind all the blandly shining windows.
Julius had no attention to spare for the view. He was too conscious of Grace’s warm shoulder and arm beneath his own. He had grown rapidly in the last year – he was taller even than Jake now – and he stood a head higher than Clio and Grace. Grace seemed very slight and fragile next to his own lumbering bulk. He turned his head very slightly, breathlessly, so that he could look down on the top of her dark head. Clio still wore her hair in a long plait that hung down her back, but Grace had put her hair up in a shiny, smooth roll that showed her ears. He could see the pink rim of her ear now, and the whiteness of her neck in the shadow of her blouse collar.
He felt a spasm of tenderness for her, and at the same time a startling, fierce determination that he would never allow anything to hurt her.
He moved round so that he stood in front of her, blocking out the vista of trees and rooftops. Grace looked up at him, her mouth opening a little, surprised but unafraid.
Julius wanted to take her face between his hands and hold it, so that he could study all the contours of it, but he felt too clumsy to trust himself. Instead he bent forward, slowly and stiffly, and kissed the corner of her mouth.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, afterwards.
‘I know it is,’ Grace answered. She was at ease with Julius. She didn’t feel any of the fear or fascination that Jake had set off inside her two summers ago. Julius was safe. His smooth skin smelt faintly of honey, she identified it now. He carried an aura of cleanliness with him. She knew that he loved her, and she loved him back, a love with clearly defined parameters.
Julius blushed. He was suffused with happiness that made him feel weak and light-headed, but he also felt quite calm and secure. There was no rush, no cause for anxiety. Grace was here, and there was plenty of time. If he had made himself analyse it he would not have been able to define what exactly there was time for, now or in the mysterious future, but the rush of happiness defeated logic. He wanted to lift Grace up in his arms and swing her round, laughing and shouting, but the knowledge of his own clumsiness restrained him again. Instead he reached out and touched her shoulder, near where the collar of her blouse folded against her throat. Immediately all the sensation in his body concentrated itself in his fingertips. The fabric semed ethereally soft, as if it might melt under his touch. He shook his head, slowly, in amazement.
Grace reached up and took his hand. She turned him gently so that they faced the window again, and then settled herself against him, in the crook of his arm. To Julius, the gesture seemed wonderfully natural and confiding. He held her and they went on looking out at the view together.
He didn’t know how long it was they stood there, but it seemed a long time.
At last, they heard Tabby running down the linoleum corridor outside the door. She was calling for Eleanor, and there was a clatter as she jumped three steps in the angle of the passage and skidded along the slippery stretch to the nursery. Another door slammed somewhere else in the house, and Grace and Julius remembered that they were not the only people in the world.
Grace stepped to one side and put her hands up to her hair, smoothing it where it was already smooth. Julius loved the womanly economy of the gesture. He was thinking, I will remember this, the look of her, the way she is outlined in the light against the window.
‘I must go and help Aunt Eleanor,’ she said.
Julius watched her go, and watched the door for a long moment after it had closed behind her. Then he picked up his violin again. He could play the Rondo now, he wasn’t afraid of it any longer.
Nathaniel came home, bringing the evening papers with him. Eleanor hurried to meet him as she always did, as soon as she heard his key in the lock. Their eyes met, telling one another, No bad news. Not yet. Only then did Nathaniel kiss her. Tabby and Alice came running and he lifted them up in turn and swung them in the air, growling like a bear to make them laugh and then scream to be put down again. Julius came more slowly down the stairs and Nathaniel clasped him briefly. They were the same height, now.
Evenings in the Woodstock Road belonged to the family. It was one of the things Grace particularly liked about staying with the Hirshes, that there had never been the starching and combing before the stiff half-hour visit to the drawing room that was always the routine at home.
Before dinner Eleanor and Nathaniel always sat in the big, comfortable room at the back of the house that looked down over a narrow wrought-iron balcony into the garden. Nathaniel sometimes played Pelmanism with the children, all of them ranged in a circle around the mahogany table. A lamp with a shade of multi-coloured glass threw flecks of different-coloured light on the ring of faces. On other evenings Eleanor played the piano or Julius his violin, and the children took it in turns to sing. Nathaniel particularly enjoyed the singing, and would join in in his resonant bass. His voice was so unsuited to the sentimental Victorian ballads that Eleanor favoured that the children would have to struggle to avoid collapsing into furtive giggles.
At other times there were the general knowledge games that Grace dreaded because she seemed to know even less than Tabby, and she would hurriedly suggest charades or recitations as a diversion. Jake’s special piece had always been a theatrical rendering of ‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’; when she closed her eyes on this evening’s tableau of Eleanor sewing and Julius and Nathaniel playing cards with the little girls, Grace could hear him intoning ‘I sprang to the stirrup’. He always snatched up the invisible bridle and bared his teeth like a brigand.
There was no Jake tonight, of course. They felt his absence. With her new empathy Grace knew that Clio, hunched over a book in the corner of the room, was not reading but thinking about him.
Jake’s place was taken by two of Eleanor’s convalescents. They sat near to her, talking quietly. But for this difference the well-worn room looked just as it always did, with its sagging seats and piles of books and newspapers, and the murky picture of steamers on the Rhine that always hung on the wall facing the French windows.
But Grace was possessed by the realization that everything was changing. The war had crept in here, into the Woodstock Road as well as Stretton; she had not even understood how significantly. She tasted a mixture of resentment and apprehension, dry in her mouth.
When Clio’s eyes wandered yet again from her book they met Grace’s. Even the old ground between them was changing its contours, but they were both glad of that. They needed their new friendship now.
Before dinner, Nanny came to take Alice and Tabby back up to the nursery. Nathaniel poured sherry into little cut-glass thimbles for the men, and there was general talk until it was time to go in to dinner.
Tonight, one of the housemaids had placed the evening post on a silver tray that stood on the hall table. When the family crossed the hall on the way to the dining room they saw that there were two thin blue foreign envelopes lying side by side.
Eleanor moved with surprising speed. She scooped up the two letters from Jake and then, seeing the inscriptions, she held one of them out with a little involuntary sigh of disappointment.
‘One is for you, Grace.’
It was the first letter she had received in the Woodstock Road. The others had been addressed to Stretton, or Belgrave Square. She took it, feeling the harsh crackle of the envelope between her fingers. She put it straight into the