‘Don’t forget the present. Enjoy yourself.’
Nelly opened the front door. Through the open drawing-room door beyond Hugo could see a line of cushions, and a dozen pairs of flying feet. Someone was thumping out a Strauss waltz on the piano. The games were in progress.
‘Hugo, Hugo.’
Alice saw him first. Musical bumps were abandoned as the Hirshes came flooding out into the hall.
‘Happy birthday, miss.’ Alice was a favourite of Hugo’s. He held the present above her head, so she had to jump for it.
‘Be careful, Alice,’ Eleanor scolded. ‘Hugo, this is wonderfully good of you.’
‘I’m not an invalid, Aunt Eleanor, I don’t know about good. College tea is a poor show on Saturdays. Is there anything left?’
Grace and Peter did not hear the new arrival. They only heard the rasp of one another’s breathing, and the rustle of clothes, and the small squeak of the iron bedstead.
They could not have heard Hugo asking, ‘Where’s Grace? Not in a sulk, somewhere, is she?’
But if they had been listening they would have heard the quick clicking of Eleanor’s heels as she came along the linoleum corridor. She had not been able to find Grace in the garden, nor in her bedroom, so she could not have retired with a headache. The only possibility was that she had looked in to see if any of the patients needed anything. Eleanor was thinking that it was considerate of her, with the rest of the household so busy elsewhere.
When it opened, the door seemed to admit a wedge of cold blue light into the room. Peter felt it touch him, and freeze him. Eleanor stood in the coldness of it, staring at them in silence, for what seemed an eternity.
‘Grace.’
He understood then, but only then.
‘Nemesis was swift and awful,’ Jake said afterwards. He was the only one of them who could joke about it; even much later. For Julius, it was the time when he began to understand that he was a spectator in Grace’s concerns, not a participant.
Grace was sent back to London, to Blanche, in the deepest disgrace. She spent the remainder of the year, until the war ended, yoked to a series of chaperones and fulfilling a round of charity work and visits with her mother.
She always claimed thereafter that those months were the most miserable of her life.
Peter Dennis returned to the hospital, and Nathaniel wrote a stiffly worded letter to his commanding officer. Before the ambulance came to take him away, defiant and dry-eyed Grace managed to insinuate herself into his room for the last time. She was supposed to be folding linen in a cubbyhole downstairs, but she had walked through the house with her head held up and no one had come out to intercept her.
‘I wanted to say goodbye,’ she told him. ‘Even though we haven’t been properly introduced.’
Peter stared at her in incomprehension. He could not imagine what it was that drove Grace to pretend carelessness, even comedy, when he could see that she was miserable. He was wondering how what had seemed with Clio to be innocent and natural should have become a matter for shame and public humiliation, because of Grace. He felt ashamed when he remembered what he had done with this mutinous girl, letting himself believe that she was Clio.
‘I suppose the gentlemanly course would be to ask you to marry me.’ He thought sentimentally of marrying Clio, the impossible outcome.
Grace gave a harsh spurt of laughter. ‘I’m not ready to marry anyone yet. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t feel that you should apologize.’
Grace didn’t seem to flinch. She held out her hand. ‘Won’t you say goodbye?’
There was something determined about her, a toughness that he disliked but could not deny. At last he held out his hand in return. Grace shook it, and then turned without another word and went back to folding the linen, waiting for her father’s chauffeur to come and take her away.
In the hours before the ambulance arrived Peter waited and wished, but Clio didn’t come.
It was Clio who suffered most. She could not bring herself to go up to the turret room again, imagining Grace there. She didn’t want to see her brothers’ sympathetic, speculative expressions, or her mother’s anxiety, or Nathaniel’s disappointment. She wanted to be with Peter as they had been before Alice’s birthday party, and that possibility was gone for ever. She sat in her bedroom, listening to the timid sounds of the shocked household, until Grace came.
No one overheard what passed between Clio and Grace before the chauffeur came, and neither of them ever talked of it afterwards.
It was Clio’s anger that made Grace realize the final absurdity of having tried to imitate her. She had expected tears or temper, but nothing like the bitter fury that Clio turned on her. For all their seventeen years together, she had never properly known her cousin.
‘You have to have everything, don’t you?’ Clio had whispered. Her eyes were like black holes in her white face. ‘You have to take everything for yourself. You don’t really want it, because you don’t know what you want, but you can’t bear anything to belong to someone else.
‘That was how it was with Jake and Julius, wasn’t it? Not loving them for themselves, but just demonstrating that you could have them, mesmerize them.’
Grace tried to laugh. ‘I’m not a hypnotist.’ But Clio’s cold face froze her.
‘No. You’re a liar, a deceiver. And you saw what I felt about Peter, so you had to wreck it, didn’t you?’
‘Clio, that’s not true. He mistook me for you. I thought it would be like Blanche and Eleanor, when they were girls. It was a way of being closer to you …’
There was too little time, and Grace knew at once that the hasty elision of what she had really felt was the wrong explanation.
Clio spat at her. ‘You are not close to me. I hate you, Grace. I want to kill you.’
Grace faltered. ‘No, you don’t. I did something stupid and thoughtless, and I regret it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
Clio shook her head. The anger inside her seemed to expand, stretching taut the skin of her face, tightening her scalp over her skull. The blood throbbed behind her eyes, and she wanted to reach out her fingers to Grace’s throat, to squeeze the soft, startled smile off her face.
In a small smothered voice she said, ‘After all this time. After living here, with us. I hate you. I could easily kill you.’
Grace’s own anger rose up in response. ‘Living here? With you complacent, condescending Hirshes? Who are you, after all? What do you know?’
‘Go away, Grace. Go away now, before I hit you.’ Clio ran across the room, and flung the door open. Ida the housemaid’s frightened face was revealed on the other side, her hand raised to knock.
‘The car is here, Lady Grace,’ Ida mumbled.
From her window, Clio watched Grace’s boxes being stowed in the dicky. She didn’t move until Grace had taken her seat, stiff-backed, until the chauffeur had closed the door on her and swung his starting handle, until the car had rolled away and out of sight down the length of the Woodstock Road.
Two hours later, from the same place, she saw Peter’s wheelchair rolled up the ramp into the high-sided ambulance. She didn’t know where they were taking him.
Six weeks later, a small parcel came addressed to Alice. Inside it was a tiny carved dog kennel, and a miniature china cocker spaniel. A single line on an otherwise blank sheet of paper wished Alice a belated happy birthday. There was no address.
After some thought, Eleanor and Nathaniel allowed Alice