Woodstock Road house had always been full of books and atlases and globes of the night sky, taken for granted by the Hirsh children. Grace had concealed her ignorance by always trying to take the lead, directing the talk or the game on to ground that was safe for her. She preferred Kim’s Game to quizzes, fantasy to fact. She looked down at Jake now.
‘Isn’t that rather Culmington?’ she demanded.
Grace had coined the term from Hugo’s title. In the beginning they had used it to describe the qualities stoutly advocated by Hugo himself: decency and fairness and a willingness to play the game by the rules. There was no malice against Hugo in it, it was simply that the circle considered themselves more imaginative and less conventional than the Viscount. By extension the term had come to refer to doing the right thing, public spirit, duty and virtue. To dullness.
Jake waved languidly. ‘One has to accept these tasks.’ He said to Clio, ‘Grace didn’t mean that kind of news.’ He knew that Grace was asking him to offer his equivalent of what now seemed so obvious and intriguing about her, evidence that he had grown up.
‘What kind, then?’ Clio demanded.
Grace began to walk to the window, measuring her steps. ‘News of life. Love.’
‘Love?’ Julius sniggered; reached across the gap of the fender to nudge Clio. Julius was still a boy, only thirteen.
Grace’s eyes met Jake’s, and they smiled. Watching, Clio knew that her cousin had created a pair with Jake, and that she and Julius were excluded.
At the window Grace spread her hands on the sill and looked down into the road. There was a grocer’s delivery cart clopping by, her mother’s car with the chauffeur polishing its gleaming nose, almost no one else to be seen. Oxford was asleep in the depths of the Long Vacation. But after Stretton the Woodstock Road looked as busy as Piccadilly.
‘What shall we do?’ she asked.
‘You choose. It’s your first afternoon,’ Julius said politely, wanting to cover up his lapse.
‘Pitt-Rivers, then,’ Grace answered.
They left the playroom and chased down the stairs, as if they were children after all.
Blanche and Eleanor were drinking tea together. Hugo had gone out, announcing that he wanted to look around the place. The next year at Eton would be his last and he planned to go up to Christ Church. His attitude to Oxford was already calmly proprietary. The other children laughed at this embodiment of Culmington.
They met Nathaniel at the bottom of the stairs. He had shrugged himself into his light summer coat, and carried his panama hat in one hand and a leather bag full of papers in the other.
‘We’re going to Pitt-Rivers, Grace has chosen. Where are you going, Pappy?’
‘Into College, just for an hour. If you would like, I will meet you at Pitt-Rivers and we can walk in the Parks.’
‘Yes, yes we can do that. Only don’t forget about us as soon as you get to College and sit there for hours and hours, will you?’
‘I’ll try not to,’ Nathaniel said, not denying the possibility.
They left the house and walked towards the city, through the patches of shade cast by the big trees lining the road and out into the sunshine again. Nathaniel walked quickly, taking long strides, but the children easily kept pace with him. When they came to the red-and-yellow bulk of Keble, with its chapel looking – as Clio always said – like some animal on its back with its legs in the air, they turned into Parks Road and Nathaniel left them.
The Pitt-Rivers loomed across the road. They hurried over to the arched entrance and the yawning attendant in his booth nodded them in. They passed through the door and into the museum.
The smell descended around them. It was compounded of dust, formaldehyde, and the exudations of rumbling hot-water pipes, animal skins and bones, and mice. The air was thick from being long enclosed, and the dim light hardly illuminated the exhibits in their glass cases. The silence was sepulchral.
The cousins breathed in; looked up into the wooden galleries rising above their heads where the occasional shuffling don might be glimpsed, and fanned out ready to make their tour of inspection.
They had been visiting the museum ever since they were old enough for Nathaniel to bring them, on wet winter afternoons when their woollen hats and mufflers steamed gently and added to the miasma. It had been an outing, a place where Nathaniel told stories sparked off by the sight of a gruesome shrunken head or a decorated shield, a mysterious treasure cave remote from the humdrum Oxford, and for Grace a source of information that she secretly gathered to herself. Grace knew about the earth’s mineral deposits because she had learnt the display labels beside the glittering chunks of quartz and mica and haematite.
Later, when they were a little older, Pitt-Rivers had become a place of refuge away from the house. No one ever objected to their making the short walk to the museum. They had drifted between the tall cabinets, peering in at the jumble of trophies within and then at their own reflections in the murky glass, waiting for something to happen.
Each of them had their favourite exhibits and they visited them in ritual order, jealously checking to make sure that each item of the display was intact. Jake liked the Mammals, a small collection of stuffed arctic foxes and ermines and skunks with mothy hides and bright glass eyes, their stiff legs and yellow claws resting on wooden plaques garnished with little fragments of tundra. Julius preferred the Story of Man, a Darwinian series of tableaux culminating in Modern Man, a wax dummy complete with bowler hat and starched collar. Clio headed for the Dinosaurs, peering upwards through the ark of a rebuilt rib-cage and sighing over the great empty skulls.
Grace’s favourite was Geology, considered very dry by the others. She could stand for hours looking at the black slabs stained with ochre iron, at polished golden whorls and salty crystals, and at an egg of grey rock split to reveal the lavender sparkle of raw amethyst.
She found that her rocks were all in their places, the labels beside them only a little yellower and the spidery handwriting fading into paler sepia. She rested her forehead against the glass, transfixed by the mathematical purity of hexagonal prisms of quartz. She was thinking that her mother’s diamonds came from the same source, from rocks like these chipped out of the deep ground somewhere. Grace liked the diamonds although they would be worn by Hugo’s wife, not her, but she preferred these other crystals still half embedded in their native rock. They gave her a vertiginous sense of the earth’s prodigality, her own smallness in comparison.
She was still leaning her head against the case when Jake came up behind her. He stood at her shoulder, looking down at the eternal display of stones. Then he shifted his gaze to Grace’s hair, a thick ringlet of it lying over her shoulder, and the lines of her cheek and jaw. He saw that her breath made a faint mist on the glass. He reached up with his finger and touched the haze, and it seemed such an intimate part of Grace herself that the blood suddenly hammered in his ears and he opened his mouth to suck in the thinned air.
With the tip of his finger in the mist Jake traced the letter G.
Grace turned to look at him then with colour in her face that he had never seen before. Jake felt as if a fist had struck him in the chest, but he looked steadily back at her. He saw the faint bronze flecks in the brown of her eyes.
Something had happened, at last.
Then
