‘It’s gone,’ they said sadly.
The mother or aunt reassured them. ‘It will be happier, you know. A crab isn’t like the dogs, or Grace’s rabbits.’ And, seeing their miserable faces, she would laugh her pretty silvery laugh, and tell them to run over to Nanny and ask if they might walk to the wooden kiosk at the end of the beach road for lemonade.
When was that? Clio asked herself. Which summer, of all those summers? Grace and Julius and I must have been nine, and Jake eleven.
Nineteen ten.
And where?
It might have been Cromer, or Hunstanton. Not France, that was certain, although there had been two summers on the wide beaches of the Normandy coast. That had been Nathaniel’s doing, too. He had made the plans, and chosen the solid hotels with faded sun awnings and ancient, slow-footed waiters. He had supervised the exodus of the families, marshalling porters to convey brass-bound trunks, seemingly dozens of them, and booming instructions in rapid French to douaniers and drivers. It had all seemed very exotic. Clio was proud of her big, red-mouthed, polyglot father. Uncle John Leominster seemed a dry stick beside him, and Clio glanced sidelong at Grace to make sure that she too was registering the contrast.
But if Grace noticed anything, she gave no sign of it. She would look airily around her, interested but not impressed. Her own father was the Earl of Leominster, milord anglais, and she herself was Lady Grace Stretton. That was superiority enough. Clio writhed under the injustice of it, her pride in Nathaniel momentarily forgotten. That was how it was.
Eleanor and Blanche enjoyed Trouville. They liked the early evening promenade when French families walked out in chattering groups, airing their fashionable clothes. The Hirshes and Strettons joined the pageant, the sisters shrewdly appraising the latest styles. The Countess of Leominster might buy her gowns in Paris but Eleanor, a don’s wife, couldn’t hope to. She would take the news back to her dressmaker in Oxford.
The two of them drew glances wherever they went. They were an arresting sight, gliding together in their pongee or tussore silks, their identical faces framed by huge hats festooned with drooping masses of flowers or feathers. Their children walked more stiffly, constrained by their holiday best, under the benign eye of whichever husband happened to be present. Grace liked to walk with Jake, which left Julius and Clio together. Clio was happy enough with that, but she would have preferred it if Jake could have been at her other side.
They were all happy, except for Uncle John, who did not care for Abroad. Blanche never wanted to oppose him, and so the experiment was only repeated once. After that, they returned to Norfolk.
Nineteen eleven was the year of the boat.
The summer holiday began the same way as all the others. The Hirshes and their nanny and two maids travelled from Oxford to London by train, and stayed the night in the Strettons’ town house in Belgrave Square. It was an exciting reunion for the cousins, who had not seen each other since the Easter holiday at Stretton. Clio and Grace hugged each other, and then Grace kissed Jake and Julius in turn, shy kisses with her eyes hidden by her eyelashes, making the boys blush a little. Hugo watched from a safe distance. He was already at Eton, and considered himself grown up. The other four sat on the beds in the night nursery, locking their circle tight again after the long separation.
The next day, the two families set off by train from Liverpool Street station. There were three reserved compartments. The parents travelled in one, the children and nannies in another, and the maids in the third. The nannies pinned big white sheets over the seats, so the childrens’ hair and clothes didn’t touch them.
‘You never know who else has been sitting there before you, Miss Clio,’ Nanny Cooper said, compressing her lips. They ate their lunch out of a big wicker picnic basket, and afterwards the smaller children fell asleep. Tabitha Hirsh, the youngest, was still a tiny baby.
At the station at the other end, the Leominster chauffeur was waiting to meet them. He had driven up from London with part of the luggage.
That year, there was one big house overlooking the sea. It was a maze of rooms opening out of each other, with a glassed-in sun room to one side that smelt of dried seaweed and rubber overshoes. The children ran through the rooms, shouting their discoveries to each other while the maids and nannies unpacked.
Later, in the early evening, there was the first scramble down on to the beach. The clean air was full of salt and the cries of gulls. Nathaniel put on his panama hat and went with the children, letting them run ahead to the water’s edge and not calling them back to walk properly as the nannies would have done. From the high-water mark, where the girls hesitated in fear of wetting their white shoes, they looked back and saw Nathaniel talking to a fisherman.
‘What’s he doing?’ Julius called. ‘Can we go fishing?’
When he rejoined them, Nathaniel was beaming. ‘Surprise,’ he announced, waving his big hands. The children surged around him.
‘What is it? What?’
‘Look and see.’
They followed him across the sand. There was an outcrop of rock draped with pungent bladder wrack, and an iron ring was let into the rock. A rusty stain bled beneath it. A length of rope was hitched through the ring, and the other end of it was secured to a small blue dinghy beached on the sand. A herring gull perched briefly on the boat’s prow, and then lifted away again.
Grace stooped to read the faded lettering. ‘It’s called the Mabel.’
‘Your Mabel, for the summer,’ Nathaniel told her.
‘Ours? Our own?’
‘I’ll teach you to row.’
Hugo was already fumbling with the rope. ‘I can row.’
Nathaniel and the fisherman eased the dinghy down to the water’s edge, steadying it when the keel lifted free and bobbed on the ripples.
‘Six of us. You’ll have to sit still. Hugo in the front there, Jake and Julius in the middle. Leave room for the oarsmen. The girls at the stern.’ He ordered them fluently, and they scrambled to his directions, even Hugo. The fisherman in his tall rubber waders lifted Clio and swung her over the little gulf of water.
‘There, miss. Now your sister’s turn.’ He went back for Grace, and hoisted her too.
‘She’s my cousin, not my sister,’ Clio told him quickly.
‘Is that so? She’s like enough to be your twin.’
‘He’s my real twin,’ Clio pointed at Julius.
‘But he’s nothing like so pretty,’ the man twinkled at her. Clio was sufficiently disarmed by the compliment to forget the mistake. Nathaniel dipped the oars, and the Mabel slid forward over the lazy swell.
There had been boat rides before, but none had seemed as magical as the first trip in their own Mabel. They bobbed out over the green water, into the realm of the gulls. Only a few yards separated them from the prosaic shore, but they felt part of another world. They could look back at the old one, at the holiday house diminished by blue distance and at the white speck of a nanny’s apron passing in front of it. Out here there were the cork markers of lobster pots, a painted buoy with another gull perching on it, and the depths of the mysterious water.
Grace leant to one side so that her fingers dipped into the waves. She sighed with pleasure. It was the first day of the holidays. There were six whole weeks to enjoy before she would be returned to Miss Alcott and the tedium of the schoolroom at Stretton. Jake and Julius were here. She was happy.
Nathaniel bent over the oars. The dinghy skimmed along, and the sea breeze blew the railway fumes out of their heads.
Jake said, ‘I can see Aunt Blanche. I think she’s waving.’
Nathaniel