LITMIR.BIZ

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said, ‘Yes.’

      ‘Then consider it a fact,’ Julius told her.

      ‘Thank you.’ She lifted her head and kissed him on the cheek. Being physically close to Julius always made Grace feel happy. There was a wholesomeness about him that she liked very much. His olive-coloured skin smelt good, and he gave and received kisses and hugs quite naturally, as if they were a matter of course.

      Jake did not, she remembered. Jake jumped and started as if something hurt him, and then he clutched with overheated hands and frightened her. When she was not frightened she recognized an avid, beseeching kind of eagerness in him. It embarrassed her, and made her want to laugh, and that was not what he wanted from her at all.

      Jake and Grace had not seen very much of one another since the summer at the beginning of the war, and when they had met they had ignored the few opportunities of being alone together, as if by mutual agreement.

      And yet, since he had been at the hospital in France, Jake had written to her three or four times. They were extraordinary letters that didn’t seem to speak with Jake’s familiar voice. Grace kept them tied with a piece of braid in a pocket of her writing case. She did not take them out to reread when a new letter came, but quickly undid the braid and then fastened it up again.

      Grace kissed Clio too, and then sat back with satisfaction between the two of them. It was comfortable with Julius’s arm around her, and with Clio on the other side, companionable instead of challenging.

      I was lonely, Grace thought, and now I’m not lonely. She felt sleepily grateful to Clio and Julius.

      Clio picked up her book again. ‘May I finish my French, please?’

      It was the middle of October and the lawns and flowerbeds were overlaid with a brown mosaic of fallen leaves, but the bench was sheltered by a high wall of red brick and the afternoon sun was warm. For once, Grace felt glad that there was nothing else to do but sit here, resting her head against Julius’s shoulder.

      At the beginning of her visit, wanting to prove her good intentions, Grace had repeated her suggestion that she might perhaps accompany Clio to her day school in Oxford. But most of the girls were the studious daughters of dons, and Grace had seen at once from the reactions of Nathaniel and Clio herself that she would be hopelessly out of her depth in a class with her own age group. She had no desire to be relegated to studying with the twelve-year-olds, and so she added quickly, ‘But my father might not want that, and perhaps I could do something here for Aunt Eleanor that would be more useful than mathematics?’

      ‘Nothing is more useful than mathematics, except possibly Latin,’ Nathaniel had said severely. But the Hirshes had agreed that Grace would be a valuable assistant for Eleanor in looking after the convalescents. Lately it had become her job to lay trays and to hurry upstairs with them, to cut up food and to carry hot water in jugs, and to do whatever she could to save her aunt’s legs and the energies of the overworked housemaids.

      The men liked Grace, although she did not find it easy to be relaxed and happy with them and to forget what they had suffered, as Clio seemed able to do.

      The middle of the afternoon, once the luncheon trays had been cleared away, was the quiet part of the day. The convalescents were sleeping, or reading, and even Tabby and Alice were resting.

      It was good, Grace reflected, to be busy enough to find a break in the afternoon sunshine so welcome.

      Julius stirred beside her. ‘Are you asleep?’ he whispered.

      ‘No. Just thinking.’

      Of all Grace’s moods and humours, and he could have listed a score without any effort, Julius liked her contemplative manner best. He felt closest to her then, as if they could exchange ideas without words, across some invisible membrane. ‘Serious thoughts?’

      She smiled at once, skimming away from him. ‘Not very. Not at all.’

      Clio jammed her fingers into her ears and hunched closer over her textbook. ‘I’m trying to work. Please.’

      Julius lifted his arm from Grace’s shoulders, yawned, and stretched his long legs. ‘And I have to go and practise.’

      Grace said, ‘May I come and listen?’ She liked to be the audience, sitting silently through the music and applauding when he reached the end of a piece. Sometimes Julius played to his audience of one, tucking his violin under his arm and making a deep bow, and sometimes he lost himself in the music and forgot her altogether.

      ‘You certainly may,’ Clio answered for him, and Julius and Grace laughed and walked back through the garden to the house.

      Julius’s room was bare, like a monk’s cell. The papers and sheets of music on his table were laid in neat piles and squared off at right angles to each other. The covers on the iron-framed bed were drawn up with the same geometric precision. The only ornament was an engraving of the head of Mozart hanging on the wall next to the window.

      Grace hesitated between the smooth bed and the upright chair in a corner, and opted for the chair. She sat down, straight-backed, and folded her hands in her lap.

      Julius lifted his violin and tucked it beneath his chin. Grace saw how it became part of him. With the tip of his bow he indicated the sheet music on the music stand. ‘The Rondo Capriccioso, Camille Saint-Saëns,’ he announced formally. And then he added, ‘It’s rather difficult, in parts.’

      It was one of the pieces his teacher had recommended he work up for his Royal College audition. The flying staccato run in E major still made him feel sweaty when he thought of it. ‘It calls for practice, Julius,’ his teacher had advised him. He took a breath now and lifted his bow.

      Grace listened, intently at first, but then her attention began to wander. There was a fast section, where the notes seemed to climb and tumble over each other, and each time he played it Grace was sure that this time Julius would be satisfied with it and move on. But each time he broke off and jerked his bow away from the strings, closed his eyes to refocus his attention, and then began again, over and over.

      Grace could not even hear what it was that displeased him.

      She would have been incapable of such perfectionism herself. All her own instincts would have led her to scramble through the awkward passage somehow, anyhow, and then to hurry on, aiming for the end in one triumphant rush.

      Julius stopped yet again, and patiently began one more time. He had forgotten she was there. She watched his face with its shuttered look of intense concentration.

      She knew that Clio’s schoolfriends considered Julius to be handsome, and she had agreed with their judgement without giving it very much thought. Now, as she studied him with detachment through the skein of music, she noticed that he had heavy rounded eyelids that looked as if they might have been sculpted and a deep upper lip with a strongly defined margin, and that his perfectly harmonious features were more feminine than conventionally handsome. He looked like Clio, of course. And so there was much more than an echo of her own face in Julius’s. She had known it, but now she catalogued the similarities as if she had never been aware of them before, the colour of eyes and skin, the shape of mouth and ears and the height of cheekbones. Grace smiled faintly.

      The music flowed on. This time, she realized, there was no stopping. The log jam of tumbling notes broke up and was carried away in the stream of the melody. Grace found herself leaning forward on her hard chair and willing him on, holding her breath for him as if it would help him to reach the release at the end of the piece.

      The music swelled, filling her head and the bare room until she sat on the edge of her seat, her lips apart and her eyes fixed on Julius’s blind absorbed face. The echo of the last chord vibrated in the stillness before she realized it was finished, and then Julius raised his head and she saw his shining eyes. He was panting for breath.

      ‘Bravo,’ Grace shouted. She jumped off the chair and clapped her hands until the bones jarred. ‘Julius, bravo. That was wonderful.’

      He nested his violin carefully

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