And yet Clio possessed rare pools of memory in which the water was so clear that she could stare down and see every detail of a single day, a day that had been submerged long ago by the flood of successive days pouring down upon it. Elizabeth wanted to lean over her shoulder and look into those pools too. That was why she came to sit in this room, with her miniature tape-recorder and her notebook, to look at reflections in still water.
‘A Holborough. Yes,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Mother used to tell me stories about when she was a little girl.’
When Blanche and Eleanor were girls, a hundred years ago.
‘What sort of stories?’
Clio gave her cunning look, to show that she was aware of the eagerness behind the question. ‘Stories …’ she said softly, on an expiring breath.
There was a silence, and then she began.
‘Holborough was a fine house. Not on the scale of Stretton, of course, but it was the first house in the neighbourhood. There was a maze in the gardens. Mother and Aunt Blanche used to lead new governesses into it and lose them. They knew every leaf and twig themselves. They would slip away and leave the poor creatures to wander all the afternoon. Then the gardeners would hear the pitiful cries, and come to the rescue.’
Elizabeth had visited Holborough Hall. After it had been sold in the Twenties it had been a preparatory school and then in wartime a training camp for Army Intelligence officers. After the war it had stood empty, and then seen service as a school again. Lately it had become a conference centre. The famous maze had survived, just. It looked very small and dusty, marooned in a wide sea of tarmac on which delegates parked their cars.
‘Can’t you imagine them?’ Clio was saying. ‘Identical little girls in pinafores, whisking gleefully and silently down the green alleys?’
Elizabeth smiled. ‘Yes, I can imagine.’
‘They had to make their own amusements. There were no other children. It wasn’t like it was for me, living in the middle of Oxford, with brothers and cousins always there.’
But it had been a happy childhood, Clio knew that, because Eleanor and Blanche often spoke of it. There had been carriage drives and calls with their mother, when she was well enough. There had been outings in winter to follow the hunt, with their father’s groom. Sir Hubert was an expert horseman. There had even been visits to London, to shop and to visit Earley relatives. There had been nannies and governesses and the affairs of the estate and the village. But most importantly of all, there had been the private world that they had created between them.
It was a world governed only by their imaginations, a mutual creation that released them from the carpet-bedded gardens and the crowded mid-Victorian interiors of Holborough, and set them free. They made their own voyages, their own discoveries, even spoke their own language. The intimacy of it lasted them all their lives, even when the intricate games were long forgotten.
Their imaginary world of play was put aside, reluctantly, when the real world judged that it was time for them to be grown up. Blanche and Eleanor accepted the judgement obediently, because they had been brought up to do as they were told, but they kept within themselves a component that remained childlike, together.
Eleanor’s husband Nathaniel thought it was this buried streak of childishness that gave them their air of unconventionality buttoned within perfect propriety. He found it very alluring.
When the twins reached the age of seventeen, Sir Hubert and Lady Holborough decided that their daughters must do the Season. Constance had been presented at Court as a débutante, and in the same year she had been introduced to and then become engaged to Hubert. There had been little Society or London life for her in the years afterwards, because of her own ill-health and her husband’s addiction to field sports, but they were both agreed that there was no reason to deny their daughters their chances of a good marriage.
Constance was apprehensive, and her nervousness took the form of vague illness. But still, a house was taken in Town, and more robust and cosmopolitan Earley aunts were enlisted to launch their nieces into Society.
The twins brought few material or social advantages with them to London in 1895. Their father was a baronet of no particular distinction, except on the hunting field. Their mother came from an old family and had been a beauty in her day, but she had not been much seen for more than fifteen years. There was no great fortune on either side.
But still, against the odds, perhaps because they didn’t care whether they were or not, the Misses Holborough were a success.
They were not beautiful. They had tall foreheads and narrow, too-long noses, but they had handsome figures and large dark eyes and expressive mouths that often seemed to register private amusement. Nathaniel Hirsh was not the first man to be attracted by their obviously enjoyable unity in an exclusive company of two. They began to be invited, and then to be courted. Young men joked about declaring their love to a Miss Holborough on one evening, and then discovering on the next that they had fervently reiterated it to the wrong one.
The joke was more often Blanche and Eleanor’s own. It amused them to tease. From infancy they had used their likeness to play tricks on nannies and governesses, and it seemed natural to extend the game to their dancing partners. They wore one another’s gowns and exchanged their feathered headdresses, became the other for a night and then switched back again. They acquired a reputation for liveliness that added to their appeal.
One evening towards the end of the Season there was a ball at Norfolk House. Blanche and Eleanor had received their cards, and because Lady Holborough was unwell they were chaperoned by Aunt Frederica Earley. Sir Hubert escorted them, although he had no patience with either dancing or polite conversation. He was anxious for the tedium of parading his daughters through the marriage market to be over and done with, so he could return home to Leicestershire and his horses. He had already announced to his wife that he considered the whole affair to be a waste of his time and his money, since neither girl showed any inclination to choose a husband, or to do anything except whisper and giggle with her sister.
The Duchess’s ballroom was crowded, and the twins were soon swept into the dancing. Their aunt, having married her own daughters, was free to watch them with proprietary approval. Blanche was in rose pink and Eleanor in silver. They looked elegant and they moved gracefully. They had no particular advantages, the poor lambs, but they would do. Mrs Earley was not worried about them.
She was not the only onlooker who followed the swirls of rose pink and silver through the dance.
There was an urbane-looking gentleman at the end of the room who watched the mirror faces as they swung, and smiled, and swung again. The room was full of reflections but these were brighter; their images doubled each other until the ballroom seemed full of dark hair and assertive noses and cool, interrogative glances.
The gentleman inclined his head to one of the ladies who sat beside him. ‘Who are they?’ he asked.
The woman fastened a button at the wrist of her long white glove.
‘They are the Misses Holborough,’ she answered. ‘Twins,’ she added unnecessarily, and with a touch of disapproval in her voice that made it sound as if it was careless of them.
‘They are interesting,’ the man said. ‘Do you know their family?’
‘The lady in blue, over there, is their aunt. Mrs Earley. I am acquainted with her. Their mother is an invalid, I believe, and their father is a bore. I would be happy to give you any more information, if I possessed it.’
The man laughed. His companion had daughters in the room who were not yet married and who were much less intriguing than the Misses Holborough. He asked, ‘And may I be presented to Mrs Earley?’
A moment later, he was bowing over another gloved hand.
‘Mr