to look around him it would have been to notice, with the same sadness even though it was for the thousandth time, that the faces of the undergraduates who swept by him were either too young, no more than boys, or else they were much older, and shadowed with experience. There were only one or two young men of the right age, and they were in khaki uniforms.
Still preoccupied with his own thoughts, Nathaniel passed the golden front of Queen’s and hurried on, intending to cross Radcliffe Square in the direction of the Bodleian. But when he reached the corner of Catte Street he had to wait to allow a brewer’s dray to pass ahead of him, and while he stood hesitating something made him look sideways, across the High.
Through the traffic he saw two young women. They were balanced on the edge of the kerb, one of them leaning on a bicycle, the other carrying a shopping basket. They were laughing, their heads held close together, and their rosy faces were bright with happiness. They looked very alike.
His first response was abstract admiration. An instant later he thought of Eleanor and Blanche, with their lifelong conspiracy of friendship. These two reminded him of the older twins. And only then, emerging from his preoccupation, did he see that the two were not strangers at all, but Clio and Grace.
He realized with a little shock that they were grown up, not children any longer. And as soon as the pair of faces dissolved into familiarity he lost the sense of how similar they were.
Clio was wearing her school coat and a dark felt hat with a coloured ribbon, and her schoolbag was fastened to the front of her bicycle handlebars. Eleanor allowed her to cycle to school now, because Clio insisted that all the other girls did. By contrast, Grace wore one of the well-tailored suits that Blanche’s dressmaker made for her. From somewhere, probably her mother’s wardrobe, she had purloined a fur tippet and cut it up to make a turban. The fur made a dark cloud around her face. The shopping basket was an incongruous accessory. It looked very heavy.
Nathaniel changed course and ducked through the passing traffic to greet them. They swung round at once with pleased cries of ‘Pappy!’ and ‘Uncle Nathaniel!’
‘What’s the joke about?’ he asked, wanting instinctively to be a part of it. The girls looked blankly at him.
‘I don’t think there was a joke, really,’ Grace answered. ‘We were just laughing. I’ve been to the Lending Library. Look.’ The basket was full of books. It was one of Grace’s responsibilities to select novels for the patients. She chose out of the depths of her ignorance, with results that varied from inspired to comical.
Nathaniel tilted his head to one side to read the titles on the spines. ‘Martin Chuzzlewit, mmm, mmm, Zuleika Dobson. That’s interesting. All very suitable. And where are the two of you going now?’
‘Home. Unless we can come with you? Out to tea?’
Nathaniel had been planning to do some work in his rooms, but the idea of tea was tempting.
Clio begged, ‘Please, pappy? Tea at Tripps’? You know it’s meatless day today. That means vegetable sausage for dinner, doesn’t it?’
The Hirsh household always obeyed the government’s edict for helping with food shortages by doing without meat on at least two days a week. But even Mrs Doyle’s version of the invariable vegetable sausage was no great favourite.
‘Tripps’ it is,’ Nathaniel said briskly.
The tea-shop on the corner of the Broad was an old favourite. Nathaniel had first taken Eleanor there long ago, before Jake was born. The crooked floors of the little rooms and the dark oak furniture and faded yellowish walls seemed exactly as they had always been; the difference was that the cakes were brought by waitresses in caps and aprons, whereas there had once been waiters like family retainers in dark jackets with white napkins folded over their arms.
Tripps’ appeared to be unaffected by food shortages. There were still tiny sandwiches cut into triangles and circlets, and chocolate roulade and ginger sponge and almond slices. Ceylon or China tea came in big silver-plated pots.
‘Heaven,’ Clio said greedily.
Nathaniel had been eating and looking around the room. The tables were occupied by groups of pink-faced boys, by mature men, usually alone and absorbed in a book, and by young ladies from the women’s halls, always in pairs.
Clio and Grace looked quite old enough to be one of those pairs, he thought, and then remembered that it was only another year or so before Clio would embark on her degree course. He was proud of her. When he finished his inspection of the room and looked back at their two faces he felt proud of both of them, the way they reflected each other, like two bright coins. He felt the same pleasure in their company as he had always done with Eleanor and Blanche. He was glad that the two of them seemed to have become such good friends. He would not have cared to place a bet on it when they were younger.
‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Grace invited.
‘I was thinking,’ Nathaniel teased, ‘that the two of you are almost as beautiful as your mothers.’
He was amused to see that they were both still young enough to look disbelieving, and then to blush fetchingly. Grace put her hands up to her hat, adjusting the fur cloud around her face. There was no echoing gesture from Clio in her old school felt.
‘Only almost?’
Grace had recovered herself. There was something so provocative in the curve of her mouth that Nathaniel was confused now by the dissimilarity between the two of them. Clio was still a little girl, Grace was not.
He was pleased that Jake and Julius had gone on, out of the family circle. And Julius had survived his period of Grace-enchantment admirably well, Nathaniel thought. His music studies would give him enough to think about from now on. ‘As yet,’ Nathaniel answered.
They had finished their tea. Nathaniel began to look forward to reaching home. He wanted to see Eleanor and to play for an hour with Alice. He loved his work, but the centre of his life was his wife and children. ‘Time to go,’ he announced.
Grace and Clio might have hoped for more cake, but they knew Nathaniel better than to argue. When they stood up to leave, Nathaniel noticed how the men’s eyes followed Grace. Clio must have some proper clothes, he decided. He would talk to Eleanor about it.
The three of them came out of the tea-shop into the greenish, fading afternoon light. Clio’s bicycle was propped against the wall nearby.
‘I’ll be home first,’ she called. ‘Lovely tea, pappy.’ She swung away from them towards Cornmarket. Nathaniel took Grace’s arm, and they began to walk.
It was a long way along St Giles and up the Woodstock Road. So it happened that Clio was the first to meet Captain Dennis.
She almost collided with Eleanor negotiating the stairs from the kitchen with a tea-tray. Clio took the tray from her mother automatically and Eleanor leant to kiss her cheek.
‘Hello, my darling. Will you take it up to the turret for me? Nelly and Ida are both so busy, and Grace is at the circulating library. Then come down and have some tea yourself.’
‘We met Pappy. He took Grace and me to Tripps’.’
‘Oh, how lucky.’ Eleanor was truly envious. She would have loved to sit in the tea-shop and gossip with her husband. Clio smiled at her, understanding as much.
