style="font-size:15px;"> Just before he fell asleep, an idea came to him.
In the morning he found Nathaniel in the breakfast room, The Times folded beside his plate. They were the first members of the household to come down. Jake helped himself to ham and eggs from the silver dish on the sideboard and sat down beside his father. He ate hungrily, watching Nathaniel frowning over the news from Europe. Then he said, ‘May we discuss something, Pappy?’
Nathaniel put his newspaper aside. ‘Of course.’
‘I have been thinking about what I should do. It’s time I had an idea. Even Hugo knows that he wants to be a soldier.’
‘Even Hugo,’ Nathaniel agreed seriously.
‘I would like to study medicine. I should like to be a doctor.’
‘You have never talked about this before.’
‘I have been thinking. I know something about so many things, and nothing about myself. Anatomy, physiology, chemistry. It came to me that nothing would interest me more than to learn, and then to apply that knowledge. The world will need doctors. I could be a doctor, not a soldier.’
Nathaniel looked hard at him. He had been thinking that Jake had shaken off his preoccupation of the last weeks, regained his old animation. Whatever his problem had been with Grace, he must have found the answer to it. Nathaniel trusted his son enough to be certain that it was the right answer.
He said, ‘If you are serious, I think it is a fine idea. I will talk to the medical man at College.’
Jake beamed at him, as pleased as a small boy. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. He went back to the sideboard and mounded his plate with a second helping of ham and eggs.
Nathaniel turned back to his newspaper, but the grey print blurred. He was thinking about Julius and hoping that when his turn came for Grace’s attention, if it did come, he would deal with it as sensibly as Jake had done.
Blanche followed her housekeeper through the enfilade of rooms that ran along the south front of Stretton. The long vista was dim because the shutters were closed. The few bright beams of sunshine that pierced the cracks and fell across their path seemed solid enough to trip her, much more solid than the furniture invisible and shapeless under its dust-covers. She stepped through one of the golden rods, and the finger of it ran over her face and then fell back over the floor behind her.
Blanche had flinched when the beam of sunlight touched her. She was thinking of Hugo, who had gone at last to join his regiment in France.
She knew that he would be killed, she knew it with unshakeable certainty, and when she thought of him, as now, the air itself seemed to bruise her with its weight of terror.
Blanche had to force herself to concentrate on Mrs Dixey’s broad back marching in front of her, to harness her thoughts to Stretton and these dim shuttered rooms. They were closing them up until the end of the war.
If the day ever comes, Blanche thought. And if I could close up the fear, as if it were the saloon or the yellow drawing room …
‘The china from these rooms is all packed in the chests now, my lady,’ the housekeeper said. ‘And stored in the billiard room, like you ordered.’
‘Very good,’ Blanche said automatically. The silver had been taken away to the security vaults, and the better pictures had been lifted down from the walls. There were darker rectangles on the faded silks and damasks, showing the places where generations of Strettons had stared down on their successors.
But in the saloon, the Sargent portrait still hung in its accustomed place. John Leominster himself had given the order for it to be left. ‘I like to know it’s there,’ he had said gruffly. ‘In the place where it belongs, even if nothing else is.’
Blanche had not asked him why, because to ask or answer such a question would not be part of their expectations of each other, but she guessed that he thought of it as a kind of talisman. Perhaps he attached some superstitious importance to it, imagining that the old, pre-war order it seemed to stand for would somehow exert its benign influence over Hugo’s fate.
She paused beneath the picture now, looking up into the innocent faces. As if it could, she thought bitterly. As if a society portrait of two silly girls could have any effect on Hugo in the trenches.
But even as she dismissed the picture she felt a wave of longing for the days it recalled, for the measured, orderly pre-war times that she was afraid were gone for ever. Her own bright painted face, and Eleanor’s mirror of it, seemed to belong to a different generation.
‘Not this portrait, you know,’ Clio had said once to Elizabeth Ainger, during one of her rambling monologues.
Elizabeth had barely glanced up at the picture that hung behind the old lady’s velvet chair. It was the work of a painter no longer very much admired, and she did not herself care for the violent expressionistic style. She knew the history of it, from family stories, and its title. The Janus Face. That was all.
‘I’m talking about the Sargent,’ Clio went on. ‘His portrait of Eleanor and Blanche. The Misses Holborough.’
‘I know,’ Elizabeth said. The Stretton family had sold the picture in the Fifties and it was now housed in a private collection in Baltimore. She had never seen the famous Sargent itself, only reproductions of it. She had suggested to her publishers that they might try to obtain permission to use the double portrait as a frontispiece for the book.
It was a pity, she thought, that the later picture, the one of Grace and Clio, was not more attractive or at least more celebrated.
‘This picture, the one of me and … and your grandmother, was intended to hang at Stretton alongside the other. But old John Leominster never liked it, and your …’
Clio paused and squinted sideways at Elizabeth, smiling a little. Elizabeth thought that she looked very old, and rather mad.
‘… the painter refused to sell it to him. He loaned it to my father, and there it stayed, in the Woodstock Road, for years and years.’
Clio’s head fell forward then, so that her chin seemed to touch her chest, and Elizabeth thought she might have fallen into one of her sudden sleeps. She could see the shape of her skull under the thin hair and paper skin, and she was touched with pity for her.
But then the skull-head jerked up again, and the surprisingly bright eyes flicked to her. ‘Such a lot of years, eh? Why are you interested in so much long-ago, forgotten nonsense?’
‘It’s my trade,’ Elizabeth answered, ‘I’m a biographer.’
The pity was still with her and she could not make herself say, ‘your biographer’.
Blanche turned her back on the mocking optimistic faces. She looked around the shadowy saloon again, up at the great glass chandelier that had been swathed in burlap, and at the ghostly shapes of gilt chairs and console tables under their dust-sheets.
The huge house seemed already dead. The clocks had been allowed to run down and not even their ticking disturbed
