Clio felt a rush of love for her father. It was only a pity, she reflected, that his determination that she should be fairly treated and the collaboration between the two families should have resulted in the choice of the same band, the same food, the same flowers and apparently the same guests as at every other girl’s dance. The only difference, as she surveyed the room, seemed to be that here the faces were redder, the band more lacklustre, the air more stifling and the yawns behind the white gloves less well concealed than at any of the other dances she had been to.
There had been a number of other dances. The first Season after the war was well under way, with a determination from everyone concerned that it should be as glittering as any Season had ever been. There had been tea-parties too, and ladies’ luncheons, and Clio had dutifully met and talked to the other girls of her year, and their mothers, and their surviving male relatives, and had invited the same girls under their mothers’ chaperonage to meet her own brothers and cousins this evening.
There were far too many ancient Stretton and Earley and Holborough uncles, gallantly but creakily waltzing, and a severe shortage of the handsome young men that even Clio had allowed herself to dream of at her coming-out dance. In fact if it were not for some medical student friends of Jake’s, some boisterous Oxford men that Hugo had brought, and the odd-looking trio that had just appeared in Julius’s wake, there would be almost no young men at all.
Clio missed Peter Dennis, as she had missed him every day for more than a year.
She missed other things too: the calm routine of Oxford, her books and the garden, and the conversation of rational human beings. She thought she had never met so many empty-headed and snobbish people as she had done in the last month, nor wasted so much time in changing her clothes, eating food she did not want, and exchanging pointless small talk with girls she did not wish to talk seriously to.
Clio was priggishly dismissing her season as a frivolous nonsense. She was only enduring it because it pleased her mother to see her, and because what pleased Eleanor also pleased Nathaniel. She would have been reluctant to admit to her dreams of meeting an interesting man. Clio was sure that she was still in love with Captain Dennis.
Victor Zuckerman was asking her to dance.
‘Thank you,’ Clio said meekly, and let him take her hand.
‘Jolly good band,’ Victor tried, not quite managing a convincing imitation of Hugo or one of his friends. He smelt strongly of whisky. Clio looked at him, trying to gauge his expression behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. His hand felt burningly hot in the small of her back. But at least he danced in time to the music. He might not trample on the toes of her satin slippers.
‘Do you think so? It is the third time I’ve heard them this week. Familiarity must be breeding contempt.’
Over Mr Zuckerman’s shoulder she saw Grace’s partner leading her back to her place. Grace was still laughing, with her head close to his. Grace would always find something to enjoy, however dismal and predictable the occasion, Clio knew that. And yet she had been sent to finishing school in Switzerland as soon as the war ended. She had made new friends, travelled to Italy, had her horizons enviably broadened. Clio could not understand her pleasure in this boring ritual.
‘That’s a jolly pretty dress,’ Mr Zuckerman offered.
‘Thank you.’ Clio couldn’t help smiling at him, he was trying so hard. Her dress had been made by Eleanor’s Oxford dressmaker. It was paper-white taffeta, with a tendency to collapse into concave panels instead of standing out in a stiff bell. The same dressmaker had made her two other ballgowns, one shell-pink and one powder-blue with darker blue bows. Clio had wanted rippling gold satin and ink-blue velvet, but Eleanor had insisted that neither was suitable.
Grace had been taken to Reville & Rossiter for her ballgowns. The London couture house was not quite Paris, of course, but it was good enough. Her dress tonight was oyster-white silk, tight-bodiced and pannier-skirted, with a hooped overskirt of the finest white net that made her look as if she was dancing in a halo of light. It was a romantic denial of all the sensible plain tunics of the war years.
Clio looked away from where Grace was being led back into the dancing by a different partner. She tried to ignore the bitterness that she felt, telling herself that she should rise loftily above it. But it was difficult not to be aware of the gulf between the two of them, just because the whole evening seemed to emphasize it.
The dance itself was being held in the Strettons’ house, whereas Clio and her family had travelled up from the increasingly battered and down-at-heel household in the Woodstock Road. Even the stiff engraved invitations declared the difference between Lady Grace Stretton and Miss Clio Hirsh.
Clio was not ashamed of her Jewish name. She was fiercely proud of her father and his academic reputation. But she was sensitive enough to have noticed in the past weeks that other people spoke her name in a certain way, looked at her in another certain way, with a flicker of speculation. ‘The father is Jewish, of course,’ she had once overheard one matron whisper to another.
Clio frowned, anger stiffening her spine a little. She looked across to where Dora Hirsh was sitting on a gilt chair. Levi Hirsh was dead, but Nathaniel’s mother was alert and straight-backed, a tiny figure in a shiny black dress with her black and gold net purse clasped on her lap. It was Dora’s money, mostly, that was paying for the band and the wilting flowers, and the bland chicken and dryish trifle that they would be eating later. Clio tried to convey love and pride and solidarity across the room to her grandmother. She was glad to see that Jake was sitting beside Dora on another gilt chair, volubly talking.
‘Are you all right?’ Victor Zuckerman asked. He must have felt Clio’s stiffness. ‘Didn’t tread on you, did I?’
It came to Clio that her partner was almost certainly Jewish too. She smiled at him with real warmth. ‘Of course not. You’re a good dancer.’
Victor beamed. He had just noticed that Hirsh’s rather prim and silent sister was extremely pretty when she smiled. Instinctively he held her closer, letting himself imagine her legs under the swathes of taffeta.
The room grew hotter. Clio danced with Jake, and then with one of the medical students who told her he was her brother’s dissection partner. They shared a cadaver between them, he said proudly. Clio thought she could detect a faint smell of formalin clinging about him, reminding her of the Pitt-Rivers.
The more elderly relatives were beginning to make their way to the supper-tables in the library when Blanche tapped Clio on the arm. ‘I don’t think you have met Mr Brock, Clio, have you? His mother was a cousin of your mother’s and mine on the Earley side.’
It was the man Grace had been laughing with. Clio saw that his evening clothes and his fairish hair were as conventionally cut as John Leominster’s, but his long, humorous face and a gap between his front teeth made him look immediately interesting, even rakish.
‘Anthony Brock,’ he said, taking her hand. Blanche had already moved away, having done her duty with yet another introduction. Clio had a momentary impression of a sea of polite pink faces, drifting away from her into oblivion, before she focused on Anthony’s.
‘I saw you dancing with my cousin Grace,’ she said, and, before she could stop herself, ‘What were you both laughing at so much?’
Anthony grinned. His well-dressed-brigand look intensified. ‘Ah, about the rituals and rigours of doing the Season. About all this, I suppose.’
One small movement of his forefinger took in the crowd, and everything that had seemed dismal about it to Clio at once became less depressing.
‘I was going to ask if I might have the honour of escorting you into supper?’
No one else had asked her. She answered with the same ironic formality. ‘With pleasure.’
The supper room was