Rosie Thomas - All My Sins Remembered

‘Give her room, can’t you?’ one of the men said roughly.

They turned Grace so that she lay on her back, and her eyes opened to stare at the sky.

Clio became aware of more movement beyond the intent circle. Blanche was coming, with Eleanor and Hills the chauffeur just behind her. The strangeness of it made her lift her eyes from Grace’s heaving ribs. There was no elegant glide now. Blanche’s head was jerking, she was hatless and her ribbons and laces flew around her. Clio had never seen her mother and her aunt running. It made them seem different people, strangers.

The two women reached the edge of the crowd and it opened to admit them to where Grace lay. Blanche dropped on her knees, giving a low moan, but no one spoke. They were listening to the faint gasps of Grace’s breathing, all of them, willing the next to follow the last. Jake and Hugo stood shivering under their wrappings of blankets. Nanny Cooper moved to try to warm them, with Clio still clinging to her apron. The other nanny began to trudge up the slope of the beach to where the small children had been left under the nursemaid’s eye. Clio took her eyes off Grace once more, to watch her bowed back receding.

They were all helpless, most noticeably the mothers themselves, kneeling with the wet sand and salt water soiling their morning dresses. They looked to the fishermen for what had to be done.

Grace’s stare became less fixed. Her eyes slowly moved, to her mother’s face. She was breathing steadily now, with no throat-clenching pauses between the draughts of air. The fisherman lifted her shoulders off the sand, supporting her in his arms. Another of the men came forward with a pewter flask. He put it to her mouth and tilted a dribble of brandy between her teeth. Grace shuddered and coughed as the spirit went down.

‘She’ll do,’ one of the men said.

Another blanket materialized. Grace was lifted and wrapped in the folds of it. Blanche came out of her frozen shock. She began to cry loudly, trying to pull Grace up and into her own arms, with Eleanor holding her back.

‘All right, my lady,’ another fisherman reassured her. ‘I’ve seen enough drownings. This isn’t one, I can promise you. Your boys got to her quick enough. Not that they should have took her out there in the beginning.’

In her cocoon of blanket, Grace shook her head. Her face was as waxen as if she had really died, but she opened her mouth and spoke clearly. ‘It was my fault, you know. Not anyone else’s.’

The fisherman laughed. ‘You’re a proper little bull-beef, aren’t you? Here. Let’s get you inside in the warm. Your ma’ll want to get the doctor in to look at you, although I’d say you don’t need him any more’n I do.’

He lifted Grace up in his arms and carried her. Blanche followed, supported by Eleanor and Hills on either side, and the children trailed after them, back to the big house overlooking the sea.

As soon as she was installed in her bed, propped up on pillows after the doctor’s visit, Grace seemed too strong ever to have brushed up against her own death. For a little while afterwards the boys even nicknamed her Bull-beef.

Clio remembered it all her life not as the day Grace nearly drowned, but as the day when she became aware herself that all their lives were fragile, and temporary, and precious, rather than eternal and immutable as she had always assumed them to be. She recalled how the land had looked when they were drifting away from it in the Mabel , and now that inviting warmth seemed to touch everything she looked at. The most mundane nursery routines seemed sweet, and valuable, as if they might stop tomorrow, for ever.

There must have been some maternal edict issued that morning for everything to continue as normal, more normally than normal, to lessen the shock for all of them. So the nannies whisked the older boys into dry jerseys and knickerbockers, and made Clio change her damp and sandy clothes, and by the time they had been brushed and tidied and inspected, and had drunk hot milk in the kitchen, the doctor had been and gone without any of them seeing him, and it was time for children’s lunch. There was fish and jam roly-poly, like any ordinary day. No one ate very much, except for Hugo who chewed stolidly. Clio wanted to cry out, Stay like this. Don’t let anything change . She wanted to put her arms around them all and hold them. But she kept silent, and pushed the heaps of roly-poly into the pools of custard on her plate.

Later in the afternoon, Clio found the two nannies together in the cubbyhole where the linen was folded. There was the same scent of starch and cleanliness that had drawn her back on the beach into the safe hold of childhood, but now she saw that both of the women had been crying. She knew they were afraid they would be dismissed for letting Grace go out in the boat.

‘It isn’t fair,’ Clio said hotly. ‘You couldn’t have stopped her. I couldn’t, nobody could. Grace always does what she wants.’ Anger bubbled up in her. Nanny Cooper had been with the Hirshes since Jake was born. She came from a house in one of the little brick terraces of west Oxford. The children had often been taken to visit her ancient parents. It was unthinkable that Grace should be responsible for her being sent away.

‘Don’t you worry,’ Nanny tried to console her. But it was one of the signs of the new day that Clio didn’t believe what she said.

In the evening Nathaniel arrived off the London train, summoned back early by Eleanor.

He called the three boys singly into a stuffy little room off the hallway that nobody had yet found a use for. They came out one by one, with stiff faces, and went up to their beds. When it came to Clio’s turn to be summoned she slipped into the room and found her father sitting in an armchair with his head resting on one hand. His expression and posture was so familiar from bedtimes at home in Oxford that her awareness of the small world’s benevolent order and fears for its loss swept over her again.

Nathaniel saw her face. ‘What is it, Clio?’

She had not meant to cry, but she couldn’t help herself. ‘I don’t want to grow up,’ she said stupidly.

He held out his hand, and made her settle on his lap as she had done when she was very small. ‘You have to,’ he told her. ‘Today was the beginning of it, wasn’t it?’

‘I suppose it was,’ Clio said at length.

But she found that her father could still reassure her, as he always had. He told her that there was no question of any blame being placed on Nanny Cooper for what Grace had done. And he told her that the changes, whatever they were, would only come by slow degrees. It was just that from today she would be ready for them.

‘What about Grace?’ Clio asked. ‘Is today the first day for her, as well?’

‘I don’t know so much about Grace,’ Nathaniel said gently. ‘I hope it is.’

Clio wanted to say some more, to make sure that Nathaniel knew Grace had insisted on going out in the Mabel , and that she had just been showing off when she leapt on to the seat. She supposed it was the same beginning to grow up that made her decide it would be better to keep quiet. She kissed her father instead, rubbing her cheek against the springy black mass of his beard.

‘Goodnight,’ she said quietly. As she went upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Grace she heard Nathaniel cross the hallway to the drawing room where the sisters were sitting together, and then the door closing on the low murmur of adult conversation.

Grace was still lying propped up on her pillows. Her dark hair had been brushed and it spread out in waves around her small face. A fire had been lit in the little iron grate, and the flickering light on the ceiling brought back memories of the night nursery and baby illnesses. Clio found herself instinctively sniffing for the scent of camphorated oil.