smiled at the world, and two years later Alice arrived. Alice never seemed to sleep or to rest and she had a shrill, frequent cry, but she was also endlessly inquisitive and resourceful in comparison with her placid sister. Nathaniel loved all his children, but he knew that Alice was almost certainly the last baby and she was his adored favourite. It was Alice he looked for first, after Eleanor, when he came into the house, and he had infinite patience with her. In return Alice would do anything Nathaniel wanted her to, even go to sleep, whilst refusing the overtures of everyone else in the family.
There were two younger children in the Stretton family too, Thomas and Phoebe, born four and seven years after the arrival of Grace. But all the younger children, cousins and siblings from Thomas right down to Alice, were always impatiently dismissed by the older ones as the Babies. For Jake and Julius and Clio and Grace only reckoned with themselves, or with Hugo as an occasional extra.
Downstairs, Alice’s screaming stopped abruptly. Nanny must have done something to pacify her. Clio strained to discern the other more distant noises. A door opened somewhere, and Clio thought she could just catch the click click of her mother’s heels across the coloured tiles of the hall. She would be walking quickly from her drawing room to Nathaniel’s study, perhaps with an armful of flowers from the garden, or the post to put on the corner of her husband’s desk. Clio smiled. At the heart of the house there was an absence of noise, the silence of Nathaniel working. He would be sitting at his desk or in the decaying armchair beside it, his beard sunk on his chest and his reading spectacles pinching the bridge of his nose. When he took the spectacles off he would massage the reddened place where they had rested.
The other noises were the ordinary sounds of the house in the Woodstock Road. The wood panelling and the floorboards creaked and protested under so many feet. The metallic rattle might be one of the two housemaids carrying an enamel jug of hot water to the nursery. The muffled thumping could be Jake descending the stairs, or Tabby banging her wooden blocks, or Mr Curler the handyman performing some repair job in the back scullery. And all these domestic sounds were wrapped in the outside whisper of the breeze in the garden trees. They made Clio feel comfortable; she had been hearing them all her life.
Now she turned her head, trying to distinguish the other sound that she was waiting for. The rattle of a car drawing up in the Woodstock Road would be an intrusion, the beginning of much more serious intrusions. Everyone else in the house was waiting for the car too, but the difference was that everyone else was looking forward to its arrival. Clio sighed. The car would bring Aunt Blanche for two days, and Hugo and Grace for much longer: their summer visit to Oxford.
Julius must have been listening too. He stopped playing in the middle of a bar, and it was two beats longer before Clio heard the throaty mumble of the idling engine at the kerbside.
A door opened inside the house and Jake’s voice rose up the stairwell. ‘They’re here!’
Clio swung her legs over the side of her bed and stood up, smoothing the layers of her skirts. She looked at herself in the small mirror hung over her plain wooden dressing table; a long look, without a smile.
Grace stood on the tiled path that led up to the front porch. She tilted her head back to gaze upwards at the Gothic windows and the pointed eaves and the absurd round turret under its witches’ hat of purple slate. Grace was smiling. She was glad to be here, she was always glad to be with her cousins. Jake ran down the steps from the front door and she held out her hands to him. He took them in his and leant closer, to kiss her cheek, as he always did. Grace slid away from him, leaving his lips pursed against the air, and she looked at him with amusement from under her eyelashes.
‘Hello Jake,’ she said, acknowledging him and demanding his acknowledgement too that she was older, prettier, more adult than she had been the last time they met, at Christmas. She had been silently practising the exact note all the way in the car. She was pleased to see that he did look again at her, with a different expression, still holding her hands.
Julius came out, with Eleanor and Nathaniel behind him. Julius was as tall as Jake but thinner, and he moved more tentatively, without his brother’s good-humoured confidence. Julius kissed Grace as he had always done. Grace did not try to demonstrate any changes to Julius, nor did she know that there was no need to because he saw them at once. Julius saw everything about Grace and remembered, storing up the precious hoard of memories.
Hugo had held back to help his mother down from the car. Hugo was nearly seventeen, almost grown up. He was fair like his father, even his colouring setting him apart from the others. Hugo shook hands heartily and automatically; Julius had once said that it made him feel like one of the Stretton tenants.
The sisters had kissed and Nathaniel had embraced Blanche before Clio appeared in the doorway. She came slowly down the stairs, listening to the confusion of greetings, and stood at the top of the front steps looking down. She saw that Grace’s navy-blue tucked linen dress was crisp, and that her own was creased from rolling on the bed. She also saw that Grace had done her hair differently, drawing it back over her ears to show more of her face.
‘Clio, oh Clio, I’m so happy to see you.’
Grace ran up the stone steps and flung her arms around her cousin. She hugged her, almost swinging her off her feet in her exuberance. At once Clio felt pleased and flattered and ashamed of her own reluctance. It was impossible not to love Grace for her warmth and enthusiasm and all the life in her. Clio hugged her back, murmuring that she was happy too. She was only thinking that Jake and Julius loved Grace, of course they would do, but that in return she behaved as if they were hers, by some seigneurial right.
They are not hers, Clio reiterated. She was fiercely proud of her brothers, and the pride was coupled with possessiveness.
‘You can have no idea how boring it has been at Stretton all these months,’ Grace was saying. ‘How much I have longed for company, died to be with you all. I would look out of the windows at the trees and grass and emptiness and moan with misery.’
‘What nonsense you talk, Grace,’ Hugo said briskly.
‘How would you know about misery, or ecstasy, Hugo, for that matter? When you are only concerned with cricket?’
Grace linked her arms through Jake’s and Julius’s and drew them up into the house with her. Clio followed thoughtfully behind, leaving Hugo to accompany the parents into the drawing room.
The four of them climbed to the playroom, their old headquarters near the top of the house. Over the years they had played and plotted across the worn carpets and horsehair sofas, and the scuffed tables and bulging cupboards showed the scars of imaginary battles and voyages. The room was so familiar to them all that none of them even glanced around. Jake dropped at full length on to one of the sofas, letting one long leg swing over the arm. Clio and Julius sat on the club fender, one on either side of the empty grate. They were alike, with the same narrow faces and the same peak of hair springing from their foreheads, but the family resemblance was just as strong between Clio and Grace.
Grace stood in the middle of the room, with their eyes on her. ‘Now, tell me the news,’ she insisted. ‘All the news.’
‘Jake is going to be house captain next term,’ Clio said proudly.
Jake and Julius were boarders at a school near Reading. Clio attended a girls’ day school in Oxford. Only Grace was being educated at home, by a governess, just as her mother and aunt had been at Holborough. She was quick-witted and had an excellent memory, but she guessed that she was not academically clever like her Hirsh cousins. She also knew that by comparison with them she was under-educated; Nathaniel was a great believer in the power of learning, whereas John Leominster considered it quite good enough just to
