jumped guiltily apart. They stood awkwardly until the punt drew level and Clio’s accusing eyes settled on them.
‘Are you enjoying the walk?’ Nathaniel boomed.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Grace said.
They turned together and began to follow the punt once more. Instead of all the things he wanted to say and couldn’t, and all the banalities he might have settled for instead, Jake blurted out, ‘Are you afraid of boats?’
It was the first time since the Mabel summer that Grace had been obliged directly to refuse to go out on to the water. Usually, with some ingenuity, she was able to evade the possibility well in advance. Now she thought how inadequate Jake’s words were. ‘Afraid of boats’ took no account of the nights when she bit the insides of her mouth to stop herself falling asleep, so the dreams couldn’t come, nor of the waking cold terror of the sound of the waves, of the simple smell of salt water.
She said, ‘I think you might be too, if you had almost drowned.’
‘Why didn’t any of us know? Haven’t you told anyone?’
Grace considered. ‘I think Julius guessed.’
Jake didn’t want to hear about Julius now. Grace went on, ‘I haven’t told anyone. Only you.’
Jake gave her such a look of happiness and gratitude for singling him out that Grace forgot her humiliation over the punt.
‘You mustn’t worry about it, Grace, I’ll look after you, there’s no need to be afraid of anything.’
She smiled, looking up at him, tasting some of the satisfaction of power. ‘Thank you, Jake,’ she whispered. He was her admired cousin, their long-time ringleader, and she wanted his allegiance to her alone, that was the admission. And it came to her that although Jake was sixteen and clever and she was three whole years younger and had been taught nothing, she still knew more than he did.
Behind the folds of her skirt she reached her hand to touch his again, and he took hold of it as though it were the Grail itself.
The twins and Nathaniel were waiting at the jetty. Julius looked from one of them to the other, with resignation. Clio stared straight ahead, and even in his confusion, Jake saw that she was jealous. He took care to walk beside her on the way home. Only Nathaniel seemed oblivious to what had been happening. He had taken the newspaper out of his bag again and he beat the rolled-up tube of it against his leg as he strode along.
When they came home, Eleanor was waiting for Nathaniel. ‘Oswald Harris is here,’ she said. ‘In your study.’
Dr Harris was one of Nathaniel’s colleagues, a specialist in Romance languages and an old family friend. He was a particular favourite of the Hirsh children, and Clio’s face brightened at the mention of his name.
‘Oh good. Will he play something with us?’
‘Not now, Clio,’ Nathaniel said abruptly. ‘Off you go, all of you.’ He went into the study, and they saw Dr Harris jump up to greet him without his usual smile. Eleanor and Blanche were left in the hallway, their clothes dappled with coloured light from the stained-glass panels in the front door.
Afterwards the cousins recalled that evening at the end of July as the first time they heard adult talk of Serbia and Austria, and the first time they overheard the murmured word crisis.
They paid little attention to it, then.
That year Hugo and Jake were considered old enough to join their parents for dinner, but the twins and Grace still had to sit down with the Babies for nursery supper. Jake was hanging up his jacket in the boot room and Nanny Cooper was already calling the rest of the children to the table when Grace appeared in the doorway. The boot room was a place of discarded galoshes and fraying straw hats and croquet mallets, and she looked around it with a brilliant smile.
‘You’re here,’ she whispered. Her eyes were shining. She closed the door silently, and came straight to him. She put her hands on his forearms, and then she reached up and kissed him on the mouth.
It was a long kiss, soft-lipped and tasting of strawberries.
Jake almost fainted. When she drew back he croaked, ‘Grace, come here again, please …’ but she was already at the doorway, easing open the door and checking the corridor beyond.
Her lips looked very red, and her smile dazzled him. ‘If I don’t go, Nanny will be down here to find me. But this is a good place, isn’t it? We can meet here again. There’s all the summer, Jake.’
Then she disappeared.
Dinner was interminable. All Jake wanted was to escape to his bed, to think in privacy and silence, but the adults and Hugo seemed disposed to sit with grave faces and talk all night.
‘It must come,’ Dr Harris judged. ‘I cannot see how it can be avoided now that Germany and France have mobilized.’
‘There must not be a war. Think of our poor boys,’ Blanche whispered.
‘If it does come, and I agree with Dr Harris that it must,’ Hugo intoned, ‘then I shall enlist at once. It will be over by Christmas, and I don’t want to miss it.’
‘Hugo, you can’t possibly. You are only sixteen years old.’
‘Almost seventeen, Mama, quite old enough. What do you say, Jake?’
Jake was startled out of his own thoughts, and unreasonably irritated that international events should disturb him now, when there were other things to consider. When there was Grace, with her strawberry mouth …
‘Jake, are you all right?’ Nathaniel asked.
He said stiffly, ‘Perfectly. I don’t believe there should be a war. I don’t believe that men should go out and kill each other over an Archduke or Serbian sovereignty or anything else. There should be some other way, some civilized way. Men should be able to demonstrate that they have higher instincts than animals fighting over their territory.’ He was reminded of the Mammals, and the Pitt-Rivers, and Grace’s breath clouding the glass of the display case. He was made even angrier by the realization that his face and neck were crimson, and that Hugo was eyeing him with superior amusement.
Nathaniel said gently, ‘I think you are right, Jake. But I do not believe that very many people share our views.’
At last the evening was over. Jake escaped to his bed, but there was no refuge in sleep. He lay in the darkness, rigid and sweating, envying Julius’s oblivious even breaths from the opposite bed. He could only think of Grace lying in her own bed, in her white nightgown with her hair streaming out over the pillow, just a few yards away.
She is your cousin, he told himself hopelessly. Almost your sister. But she had come to seek him out in the boot room, and there had been that precious, inflammatory kiss …
Jake groaned in his misery and rolled over on to his stomach. He did not touch himself, although he knew that there were men who did, plenty of them at school. But they had been issued with severe warnings, some more explicit than others, and Jake had been disposed to believe them.
The pressure of the mattress made it worse. He rolled over again and pushed off the blankets
