sure you’re right,’ Eleanor supported him, and at last Blanche inclined her elegant head. The little parlourmaid who performed the butler’s duties in the holiday house came in to announce to her ladyship that dinner was served. Nathaniel cheerfully extended an arm to each sister and they swept across the sand-scented hallway to the dining room.
Nathaniel orchestrated the conversation ably, assisted by Eleanor, and they negotiated the entire meal without a single mention of death by drowning. At the end of it, when the ladies withdrew, Blanche was visibly happy again. There was no further mention of calling John back from his sport.
Nathaniel sat over his wine for a little longer. He was thinking about the children, mostly about Grace. He had not tried to lecture her, as he had done the boys. He had sat on the edge of her bed instead. Grace had faced him with the expression that was such a subtle mingling of Blanche and Eleanor and his own dreamy, clever, ambiguous Clio, and yet made a sum total that was quite different from all of them. He thought he read, behind her defiant eyes, that Grace had already been frightened enough and needed no further punishment.
They had talked instead about the girls learning to swim. He had made her laugh with imitations of the mothers’ reaction to the idea.
Now that he was alone Nathaniel let himself imagine the threat of Grace’s death, the possibility that he had denied to the women. His fist clenched around the stem of his glass as the unwelcome images presented themselves. It came to him then that he loved his niece. There was determination in her, and there was something else, too. It was an awareness of her own female power, and a readiness to use it. She was magnetic. It was no wonder that his own boys were enslaved by her, Nathaniel thought. And then he put down his glass and laughed at himself.
Grace was ten years old. There would come a time to worry about Grace and Jake, but it was not yet.
Nathaniel strolled outside to listen to the sea. He sat and smoked a cigar, watching the glimmering whitish line of the breakers in the dark. Then he threw the stub aside and went up to his wife’s bedroom.
Eleanor was sitting at her dressing table in her nightdress. Her long hair hung down and she was twisting it into a rope ready for bed. Nathaniel went to her and put his hands on her shoulders. He loved the straight line of her back, and the set of her head on her long neck.
Very slowly he bent his head and put his mouth against the warm, scented skin beneath her earlobe. Watching their reflections in the glass he thought of Beauty and the Beast. His coarse black beard moved against her white skin and shining hair as he lifted his hands around her throat and began to undo the pearly buttons.
‘Nathaniel,’ Eleanor murmured. ‘Tonight, of all nights, after what has happened?’
‘And what has happened? A childish escapade, with fortunately no damage done. All’s well, my love.’ He reassured her, as he had reassured Clio.
All’s well.
His hands moved inside her gown, spreading to lift the heavy weight of her breasts. He loved the amplitude of her, released from the day’s armour of whalebone and starch. She had a round, smooth belly, folds of dissolving flesh, fold on intricate fold. Eleanor gave a long sigh. She lifted her arms to place them around her husband’s neck. Her eyes had already gone hazy.
Eleanor had had four children. Even from the beginning, when she was a girl of twenty who barely knew what men were supposed to do, she had enjoyed her husband’s love-making. But it had never been so good as it was now, now when they were nearly middle-aged. Sometimes, in the day-time, when she looked up from her letters or lowered her parasol, he could meet her eye and make her blush.
He lifted her to her feet now so that she stood facing him. Nathaniel knelt down and took off her feathered satin slippers. Then he lifted up the hem of her nightgown to expose her blue-white legs. His beard tickled her skin as he laid his face against her thigh.
An hour later, Eleanor and Nathaniel fell asleep in each other’s arms. In all the dark house, Grace was the only one who lay awake. She held on to her pillow, and waited for the water and her fears to recede.
‘My mother was a Holborough, you know,’ Clio said.
Elizabeth did know. She also knew that Clio’s grandmother had been Miss Constance Earley, who had married Sir Hubert Holborough, Bt, of Holborough Hall, Leicestershire, in 1875. Her daughters had been born in April 1877.
Lady Holborough never fully recovered from the stress of the twin pregnancy and birth, and she lived the rest of her life as a semi-invalid. There were no more children. Blanche and Eleanor Holborough spent their childhood in rural isolation in Leicestershire, best friends as well as sisters.
Elizabeth knew all this, and more. She had the family diaries, letters, Bibles, copies of birth and death certificates, the biographer’s weight of bare facts and forgotten feelings from which to flesh out her people. She thought she knew more about the history of their antecedents than Clio had ever done, and Clio had forgotten so much. Clio could not even remember what they had talked about last time they met.
And yet Clio possessed rare pools of memory in which the water was so clear that she could stare down and see every detail of a single day, a day that had been submerged long ago by the flood of successive days pouring down upon it. Elizabeth wanted to lean over her shoulder and look into those pools too. That was why she came to sit in this room, with her miniature tape-recorder and her notebook, to look at reflections in still water.
‘A Holborough. Yes,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Mother used to tell me stories about when she was a little girl.’
When Blanche and Eleanor were girls, a hundred years ago.
‘What sort of stories?’
Clio gave her cunning look, to show that she was aware of the eagerness behind the question. ‘Stories …’ she said softly, on an expiring breath.
There was a silence, and then she began.
‘Holborough was a fine house. Not on the scale of Stretton, of course, but it was the first house in the neighbourhood. There was a maze in the gardens. Mother and Aunt Blanche used to lead new governesses into it and lose them. They knew every leaf and twig themselves. They would slip away and leave the poor creatures to wander all the afternoon. Then the gardeners would hear the pitiful cries, and come to the rescue.’
Elizabeth had visited Holborough Hall. After it had been sold in the Twenties it had been a preparatory school and then in wartime a training camp for Army Intelligence officers. After the war it had stood empty, and then seen service as a school again. Lately it had become a conference centre. The famous maze had survived, just. It looked very small and dusty, marooned in a wide sea of tarmac on which delegates parked their cars.
‘Can’t you imagine them?’ Clio was saying. ‘Identical little girls in pinafores, whisking gleefully and silently down the green alleys?’
Elizabeth smiled. ‘Yes, I can imagine.’
‘They had to make their own amusements. There were no other children. It wasn’t like it was for me, living in the middle of Oxford, with brothers and cousins always there.’
But it had
