course it will be all right.’ Julius smiled at her. He saw Clio, standing to one side of John Leominster. Her rolled-up hair showed her white neck, and the bodice of her dress revealed the childish knobs of bone at the base of her throat. Her head was bent, and she was reading the little tasselled booklet in which she wrote her partners’ names as if it interested her.
‘Clio, may I introduce my friend Victor Zuckerman?’
It was then that an avenue opened through the dancers and he saw Grace. She was waltzing with a man he didn’t know. Her head was back, and she was laughing. The wide skirts of her balldress made white waves over the polished floor. There were white flowers in her hair.
Clio was thinking that it was a shame that so much hope and effort and anticipation should have been put into planning an evening that was so dull. She was aware of the apparent ingratitude of the thought; but then she decided that she was not being ungrateful, simply realistic.
A good deal of money had been spent. Uncle John Leominster probably had the money to spare, although he counted every penny that his wife was spending on Grace’s Season. Clio knew that her own father didn’t even really have the money, and wouldn’t have been able to give her a season at all if Grandmother Hirsh had not helped him. And then, once he had consented to Clio’s coming out in the year before beginning to study for her degree, he had been generous to the limit of his means. It was Nathaniel who had insisted that Clio must have three balldresses, and new teagowns and suits and a visit to Blanche’s London coiffeuse, just like Grace. Nathaniel’s view was that if the job was to be done at all, it must be done properly.
Clio felt a rush of love for her father. It was only a pity, she reflected, that his determination that she should be fairly treated and the collaboration between the two families should have resulted in the choice of the same band, the same food, the same flowers and apparently the same guests as at every other girl’s dance. The only difference, as she surveyed the room, seemed to be that here the faces were redder, the band more lacklustre, the air more stifling and the yawns behind the white gloves less well concealed than at any of the other dances she had been to.
There had been a number of other dances. The first Season after the war was well under way, with a determination from everyone concerned that it should be as glittering as any Season had ever been. There had been tea-parties too, and ladies’ luncheons, and Clio had dutifully met and talked to the other girls of her year, and their mothers, and their surviving male relatives, and had invited the same girls under their mothers’ chaperonage to meet her own brothers and cousins this evening.
There were far too many ancient Stretton and Earley and Holborough uncles, gallantly but creakily waltzing, and a severe shortage of the handsome young men that even Clio had allowed herself to dream of at her coming-out dance. In fact if it were not for some medical student friends of Jake’s, some boisterous Oxford men that Hugo had brought, and the odd-looking trio that had just appeared in Julius’s wake, there would be almost no young men at all.
Clio missed Peter Dennis, as she had missed him every day for more than a year.
She missed other things too: the calm routine of Oxford, her books and the garden, and the conversation of rational human beings. She thought she had never met so many empty-headed and snobbish people as she had done in the last month, nor wasted so much time in changing her clothes, eating food she did not want, and exchanging pointless small talk with girls she did not wish to talk seriously to.
Clio was priggishly dismissing her season as a frivolous nonsense. She was only enduring it because it pleased her mother to see her, and because what pleased Eleanor also pleased Nathaniel. She would have been reluctant to admit to her dreams of meeting an interesting man. Clio was sure that she was still in love with Captain Dennis.
Victor Zuckerman was asking her to dance.
‘Thank you,’ Clio said meekly, and let him take her hand.
‘Jolly good band,’ Victor tried, not quite managing a convincing imitation of Hugo or one of his friends. He smelt strongly of whisky. Clio looked at him, trying to gauge his expression behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. His hand felt burningly hot in the small of her back. But at least he danced in time to the music. He might not trample on the toes of her satin slippers.
‘Do you think so? It is the third time I’ve heard them this week. Familiarity must be breeding contempt.’
Over Mr Zuckerman’s shoulder she saw Grace’s partner leading her back to her place. Grace was still laughing, with her head close to his. Grace would always find something to enjoy, however dismal and predictable the occasion, Clio knew that. And yet she had been sent to finishing school in Switzerland as soon as the war ended. She had made new friends, travelled to Italy, had her horizons enviably broadened. Clio could not understand her pleasure in this boring ritual.
‘That’s a jolly pretty dress,’ Mr Zuckerman offered.
‘Thank you.’ Clio couldn’t help smiling at him, he was trying so hard. Her dress had been made by Eleanor’s Oxford dressmaker. It was paper-white taffeta, with a tendency to collapse into concave panels instead of standing out in a stiff bell. The same dressmaker had made her two other ballgowns, one shell-pink and one powder-blue with darker blue bows. Clio had wanted rippling gold satin and ink-blue velvet, but Eleanor had insisted that neither was suitable.
Grace had been taken to Reville & Rossiter for her ballgowns. The London couture house was not quite Paris, of course, but it was good enough. Her dress tonight was oyster-white silk, tight-bodiced and pannier-skirted, with a hooped overskirt of the finest white net that made her look as if she was dancing in a halo of light. It was a romantic denial of all the sensible plain tunics of the war years.
Clio looked away from where Grace was being led back into the dancing by a different partner. She tried to ignore the bitterness that she felt, telling herself that she should rise loftily above it. But it was difficult not to be aware of the gulf between the two of them, just because the whole evening seemed to emphasize it.
The dance itself was being held in the Strettons’ house, whereas Clio and her family had travelled up from the increasingly battered and down-at-heel household in the Woodstock Road. Even the stiff engraved invitations declared the difference between Lady Grace Stretton and Miss Clio Hirsh.
Clio was not ashamed of her Jewish name. She was fiercely proud of her father and his academic reputation. But she was sensitive enough to have noticed in the past weeks that other people spoke her name in a certain way, looked at her in another certain way, with a flicker of speculation. ‘The father is Jewish, of course,’ she had once overheard one matron whisper to another.
Clio frowned, anger stiffening her spine a little. She looked across to where Dora Hirsh was sitting on a gilt chair. Levi Hirsh was dead, but Nathaniel’s mother was alert and straight-backed, a tiny figure in a shiny black dress with her black and gold net purse clasped on her lap. It was Dora’s money, mostly, that was paying for the band and the wilting flowers, and the bland chicken and dryish trifle that they would be eating later. Clio tried to convey love and pride and solidarity across the room to her grandmother. She was glad to see that Jake was sitting beside Dora on another gilt chair, volubly talking.
‘Are you all right?’ Victor Zuckerman asked. He must have felt Clio’s stiffness. ‘Didn’t tread on you, did I?’
It came to Clio that her partner was almost certainly Jewish too. She smiled at him with real warmth. ‘Of course not. You’re a good dancer.’
Victor beamed. He had just noticed that Hirsh’s rather prim and silent sister was extremely pretty when she
