room grew hotter. Clio danced with Jake, and then with one of the medical students who told her he was her brother’s dissection partner. They shared a cadaver between them, he said proudly. Clio thought she could detect a faint smell of formalin clinging about him, reminding her of the Pitt-Rivers.
The more elderly relatives were beginning to make their way to the supper-tables in the library when Blanche tapped Clio on the arm. ‘I don’t think you have met Mr Brock, Clio, have you? His mother was a cousin of your mother’s and mine on the Earley side.’
It was the man Grace had been laughing with. Clio saw that his evening clothes and his fairish hair were as conventionally cut as John Leominster’s, but his long, humorous face and a gap between his front teeth made him look immediately interesting, even rakish.
‘Anthony Brock,’ he said, taking her hand. Blanche had already moved away, having done her duty with yet another introduction. Clio had a momentary impression of a sea of polite pink faces, drifting away from her into oblivion, before she focused on Anthony’s.
‘I saw you dancing with my cousin Grace,’ she said, and, before she could stop herself, ‘What were you both laughing at so much?’
Anthony grinned. His well-dressed-brigand look intensified. ‘Ah, about the rituals and rigours of doing the Season. About all this, I suppose.’
One small movement of his forefinger took in the crowd, and everything that had seemed dismal about it to Clio at once became less depressing.
‘I was going to ask if I might have the honour of escorting you into supper?’
No one else had asked her. She answered with the same ironic formality. ‘With pleasure.’
The supper room was only half full, and it looked pretty with shaded candles on the little round tables. Clio’s spirits lifted further. Anthony Brock brought her a plate of the inevitable sauced chicken, and poured hock into her glass. Clio learnt that he worked in the City, in his father’s stockbroking company, but had ambitions to enter Parliament. He had fought in France, but it wasn’t until later that she heard from elsewhere that he had been awarded the MC.
‘And you?’ he asked.
Clio blushed. ‘I’m going up to Oxford. Modern languages.’
‘Are you, now?’ Anthony drank his wine reflectively. ‘You look very like your cousin,’ he told her.
‘I know.’ She was aware that he was studying her face. His head was a little on one side, as if he were making some decision. He put his glass down on the white cloth, matching up the foot to the faint circle left by its own weight. Then he said softly, ‘I told Grace that I was going to marry her. I don’t think she believed me.’
Clio felt her small, presumptuous glow of happiness dwindle and fade. Nothing changed, the half-eaten chicken on her plate retained the same consistency and the candles under their shades threw the same soft light, but the supper room was ordinary again, and the faces around them once more in focus, pink and solid.
She lifted her head. She was glad that he was so direct. It was a relief not to have been left to cherish an illusion, a pointless illusion.
‘I don’t suppose she disbelieved the intention. It isn’t quite unique.’ Clio couldn’t keep all the sharpness out of her voice. It was true, in any case. Grace had accumulated several admirers and more than one proposal in the course of the Season. Clio herself had had her share, although she couldn’t imagine herself accepting any one of the offers. She thought they were oddly flippant. There was a desperation under the gaiety of it all that made her think that the men who had survived wanted nothing more than to turn their backs on what they had experienced, with any woman, the first to hand.
She hadn’t talked about this to Grace, although she wondered if she felt the same. For all their present enforced intimacy, the two of them spoke only in superficialities. They were still wary, after their year’s separation.
She went on, trying to sound kind. ‘It’s just that I don’t think Grace wants to marry anyone at all. Not yet.’
Anthony was perfectly composed. ‘I can wait,’ he said. ‘But I will marry her, in the end.’
Clio laughed then in spite of herself, liking him, and at the same time remembering how she had seen Grace laughing too. ‘I shall enjoy watching the chase. I wish you the best of luck.’ She meant the good wishes and Anthony saw that she did. He put out his hand again.
‘Shall we be friends?’ he asked her.
‘By all means,’ Clio said, shaking it. And so Anthony Brock became her friend as she became his ally in the pursuit of Grace.
The evening was far from over. There were more introductions and more small talk, and yet more dances contracted for, entered on the card, and limply undertaken. Clio took her turn with the swarthy Mr Vaughan, the chronically nervous Mr Armstrong, her brothers, and Hugo’s friend Farmiloe. Hugo could not dance, but he was not short of company on his sofa to one side of the hideous chimney-piece. Hugo represented a catch, of course, and all the mothers were interested in him. Even Clio understood and accepted as much, even though it was plain that her own brothers were far cleverer and more handsome than the Viscount.
At last, when it seemed that there was not another lungful of air left in the ballroom, the trickle of girls and chaperones making their thanks to Blanche and Eleanor became a steady stream. Eleanor was leaning on Nathaniel’s arm, with Blanche on his other side. John was in the card room, where most of the remaining men had retired to play bridge and smoke cigars. The sisters were weary but satisfied. They had achieved an evening neither more nor less remarkable than a hundred others. Their daughters had looked prettier than most of their competitors, they had danced every dance, and all the requirements of the occasion had been met.
‘Did you enjoy yourself, darling?’ Eleanor asked Clio when they found themselves looking at an empty floor littered with the bruised petals from corsages and tassels dropped from dance cards.
‘It was wonderful, thank you,’ Clio said dutifully. ‘I’ll always remember it.’
Grace had been patting a cloud of net into place around her white shoulders, but now she lifted her head and caught Clio’s eye. Her expression was one of such wicked mockery and humour and conspiracy that Clio had to look away quickly to suppress a snort of laughter. It came to her that Grace was her partner in all of this, her fellow and contemporary. Eleanor and Blanche, even Nathaniel, belonged to a remote generation. They are Victorians, Clio thought. She found herself wishing that she and Grace were better friends.
Upstairs in the faintly chilly bedroom Clio took off the paper taffeta dress and hung it up. She stood in her petticoats in front of the looking glass to unpin her hair. The house was quiet at last. The bulbous mahogany bedroom suite gleamed faintly in the dim light of one electric bulb. The bed had been turned down ready for her, and there was tepid water in the ewer on the washstand, left for her by the maid. Clio splashed some of it into the white china bowl with the Leominster crest and carefully washed her face.
She was pulling her nightdress over her head, shivering as she thought of the cold, stiff linen sheets waiting for her, when there was a knock at the door. A moment later Grace slid into the room. Her hair was in a plait over the shoulder, and she was wrapped in a flame-coloured silk robe with a golden dragon embroidered on the back. She was giggling, and Clio thought immediately that Grace had managed to put away more of the innocuous white wine than she had done herself.
