she watched Clio unpacking her books, and said nothing. Clio could play at being Grace, of course, as easily as she could play at being Clio. There was a different, darker satisfaction in keeping the secret just for herself. Clio was preoccupied with her languages, busy and productive, while Grace had no such focus. The image of the puppeteer manipulating the strings came back to her.
There was a moment when she could have said, Something quite funny happened when I took a book in to Captain Dennis. Then the moment was gone.
‘Here I go,’ Clio sighed.
‘I’ll bring you up something to eat when I’ve done the trays.’
Clio blew her a kiss from the foot of the stairs. Grace did the extra work with an assiduity that made Nelly and Ida exchange surprised glances behind her back.
Later, when the girls were preparing for bed, Clio asked, ‘Have you met the new patient yet? Captain Dennis?’
Grace concentrated on her own reflection in the looking glass as she brushed her hair. She shook her head.
Clio was smiling, wanting to offer something, a confidence, in exchange for Grace’s earlier generosity. ‘He’s … interesting. Rather beautiful, in a way.’
‘The damaged hero, you mean? Another one.’
‘Oh, no. Not another, not at all. He is quite different.’
In the glass Grace saw that there was warm colour over Clio’s throat and cheeks, and her eyes were shining. Clio was ready to fall in love, and Grace felt the allure of responsive strings in her fingers. The temptation was too strong to resist. The chance to influence Clio’s love affair more than compensated for not having a love of her own. Grace didn’t think beyond that. For two or three days, until Alice’s birthday, she enjoyed the challenges of her complicated game.
Clio’s attention was torn between the books waiting on her desk and the turret room. For the first time in her life she experienced the thrill of neglecting what she was supposed to do and indulging in what she was not. She would wait in agony for what she judged to be the safest moment, then quietly close up her grammar and slip through the shadowy house to Peter’s door. He would look up when she came in, with a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty, and when she sat on the edge of the bed he would put his arms up around her neck and draw her down beside him.
Sometimes they would kiss; more often they would lie quite still, their mouths just touching, talking in whispers. Clio told him everything, about Jake and Julius and their childhoods, about Blanche and Eleanor and their different marriages, and Stretton and what had happened to Hugo, and about Grace.
‘Why haven’t I seen Grace yet?’ Peter asked once.
‘I think she’s piqued because I’ve claimed you for my own,’ Clio said, not pursuing the topic. She was quite happy for Grace to keep her distance.
At other times, Peter would begin to talk about the war. From the way his words came, reluctantly but inevitably, Clio understood that he could never close his mind to what he had seen and done. He tried to obliterate it, but he could not. She felt it always there, a long shadow between them.
Sometimes he would remember the men in his company, recalling their jokes and their idiosyncrasies and smiling at the memory so that he looked much younger, the boy that he must have been. Almost always, it seemed, these reminiscences ended with Peter saying, ‘He was killed, not long after that.’
‘What was it really like?’ Clio asked once, her whisper almost inaudible.
There was a silence before he answered her.
Then he said, ‘Like nothing you should ever know about.’
He turned her face between his hands, so that he could look into her eyes. It was difficult for him to focus on her face, so close to his. He could see the dark fringe of her eyelashes, the glint of reflected light in her pupils. Her breath was warm and sweet. He felt in this safe place that he was bathed in happiness, like sunshine.
‘I love you,’ he told her.
‘I love you too,’ Clio breathed.
Grace had to plan her own visits with even more care. She watched and waited, and then flitted like a shadow up the stairs and passageways that led to the turret: she had to avoid the nurses, and Eleanor on her rounds, and Nelly and Ida with their clanking hot-water jugs, and Clio herself.
The best time was the quiet middle of the afternoon, when Eleanor was resting in her bedroom and the maids had retired to sit with Cook in the kitchen. The nurses withdrew too, to what had once been the housekeeper’s parlour at the back of the house, where they could be summoned by an ancient system of brass bells if any of the patients needed them.
On the first afternoon Grace had thought of putting on one of Clio’s school tunics, but she dismissed the idea as too difficult to explain away if anyone else in the household should catch sight of her. She made do with a plain linen blouse and flannel skirt, and she plaited her hair in a long braid, like Clio’s.
‘Don’t you have to go to school? It is a weekday, isn’t it? Or have I lost count?’ Peter asked in puzzlement.
‘It’s Wednesday, all day,’ Grace laughed. ‘I’m supposed to be working at home. Preparing for examinations.’ She changed the subject quickly, not eager to be questioned too closely about which examinations.
She quickly discovered that it was easier not to talk very much at all. There were too many potential pitfalls in conversation. She stretched out beside him instead, measuring her supple length against him. And at the beginning, he was a willing participant. He was even the leader in their explorations of one another.
Peter was a virgin, technically. But there had been a girl at home, the daughter of one of the tenant farmers on his father’s estate. In the summer after he had left school, before he joined his new regiment, the girl had taken a fancy to him. He could still remember the smell of dust and saddle soap and horse sweat exuded by the blanket that they spread on the floor of the barn loft, and see the dreamy, intent expression on the girl’s face as she unbuttoned his clothes and took hold of him with her cool hand.
‘Please,’ he had begged her. ‘Please, let me.’
‘No-o,’ she whispered. ‘I darena’. What would I do wi’ a babby?’
‘I’ll be careful,’ he said in his innocence. The girl only giggled.
‘For sure you will. But I’ll not let you, whatever. Look, this is what you do. It feels just as good, I tell you.’
She had guided his hand until his fingers slipped in the silky wetness and rubbed against a hard nub of flesh. She had stretched out on the blanket then, with her skirts up around her waist, exposing her thin white legs and a patch of dark red hair. She had closed her eyes, sighing and lifting her narrow hips under his hand. It seemed to Peter that she took her pleasure and achieved satisfaction with the same uncomplicated innocence as the cats in the farmyard.
‘That’s right,’ she said afterwards. ‘Now I do it for you, see?’
She did, with quick, businesslike strokes, and he groaned when the milky jet spurted over the blanket to lie in glistening clots between their bodies.
Peter
