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The man’s hand enveloped hers. The grip was like a bear’s.
‘And now you must excuse me.’
Eleanor mounted the two steps to the terrace level and passed out of the sunshine into the dimness of the drawing room. Nathaniel watched her go. He was thinking with irritation that although he had been born in England, and had lived in England for most of his twenty-six years, he would never make an Englishman. He could never get the subtle nuances of behaviour quite right. He could never even get the broad principles. Today he had arrived for luncheon at least an hour too early. Then he had seen a striking girl daydreaming in the wonderful garden. An Englishman would have approached her with some stiff-necked platitude and she would have known exactly how to respond. But instead he had pounced on her with some clumsy joke. And then he had begun declaiming in Latin. Innocence amongst the green plants and like-coloured shadow, indeed.
Yet, that was how she had looked.
‘You will never learn, Nathaniel,’ he said aloud. But he was humming as he leant over and picked a yellow rose from the branch trailing over the terrace wall. He slid the stem into his buttonhole. He had liked the look of Eleanor Holborough. He had liked even better her cool admission of ignorance of Marvell’s Hortus. Nathaniel did not think many of the other guests at Fernhaugh would have acknowledged as much. He liked Philip Haugh well enough, but he did not have much patience with the rest of the crew.
He reminded himself now that he had accepted Philip’s luncheon invitation in order to come and observe the idle wealthy at play, and to be amused by them. He could see Lady Haugh beyond the drawing-room doors, so he judged that it was at last the acceptable time to arrive. Nathaniel felt familiar exasperation. How could he have known that the fashionable hour was so much later than stated?
But now that he was here he would go in and be amused, as he had intended, and at the same time he would take the opportunity of seeing where Eleanor Holborough fitted into this languid coterie.
When Eleanor came into the drawing room again the rest of the guests were assembled. She looked around quickly and saw Nathaniel Hirsh. He was talking to Philip Haugh and Norton Ferrier. Beside Philip’s well-bred colourlessness and Norton’s perfectly sculpted feminine beauty it surprised her to see how very large and dishevelled and red-blooded he looked. From time to time his huge, booming bass laugh filled the murmuring room. Eleanor sensed that the other guests had to restrain themselves from turning around to stare. And to her surprise she felt her sympathy was with Nathaniel, rather than with Mary and Norton and their friends. What had he said or done to make her feel that they were a special minority of two?
Nathaniel had seen her, but he made no effort to navigate his way through the party to her side. Eleanor concentrated very hard on the conversation immediately around her, and wondered why not.
She need not have worried. Nathaniel had already discovered from Lady Haugh that they were to be seated together at the luncheon table. He was waiting for his chance.
There was no formal taking-in at Fernhaugh, but when Lady Haugh leant elegantly on Norton Ferrier’s arm and drifted towards the dining room, Nathaniel materialized at Eleanor’s side. Philip Haugh murmured the briefest introduction. Nathaniel took her hand and bowed over it, as though they had never seen each other before. On his arm Eleanor felt small and light, as if the toes of her shoes barely touched the floor.
‘Now then,’ he said as they sat down, ‘we can talk. Tell me exactly who you are, and what you are doing here.’
Eleanor told him, and he listened intently. For the first time, she talked about herself without referring to Blanche. She laid out the bare facts of her life as if it had been hers alone, and just as Blanche had done she discovered that it was agreeable to be reckoned with for herself, instead of as one half of a whole. It was more agreeable still just to sit with this unusual, suddenly solemn man looking into her eyes. The food came and went. The partners on their opposite sides were brutally neglected. Mary Ferrier caught Lady Haugh’s eye, and they exchanged a small, surprised moue.
‘I have a twin sister,’ Eleanor said at length, touched by a finger of guilt. ‘She was married earlier this year.’
‘You miss her,’ Nathaniel remarked, as if stating what was obvious.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Are you very alike?’
‘We are identical.’
Nathaniel’s thick eyebrows drew together. When he opened his mouth Eleanor saw the movement of his tongue and the elastic contraction of his lips. She had never been so sharply aware of anyone’s physical nearness, of the few inches of air and layers of cloth between them. She should have glanced away, but she let his eyes hold hers.
‘I don’t think so,’ Nathaniel said softly. ‘I believe you are unique.’
Eleanor did look away, then. She turned deliberately to her neighbour on the other side, and began a conversation about architecture. She did not turn back until she was sure of herself, and when she did speak to Nathaniel again it was in an attempt to take control.
‘You haven’t told me who or what you are. It’s your turn to confess now.’ To her disgust Eleanor knew that she sounded arch rather than commanding. Nathaniel’s mouth twitched in the depths of his beard.
‘I am a teacher. I live in Oxford.’
That was all. Lady Haugh was standing up. Eleanor rose and followed her. When they sat down in the drawing room with their coffee cups, Eleanor found herself on a sofa between Mary and her hostess.
‘What did you think of our friend Mr Hirsh?’ Frances Haugh asked her, ready to be amused.
‘I liked him,’ Eleanor said. She hadn’t learnt the Souls’ way of pretending to feel less, or more, or something different. ‘Who is he?’
‘He’s a friend of Philip’s. He is very clever; last year he was elected a Fellow of All Souls. He is a don, a linguist, I believe. Eccentric in the way that people of that sort often are. And he is Jewish, of course.’
Eleanor had met plenty of Jews during her two Seasons. There were dozens of them in the new aristocracy. Many of them were rich, and most of them were good company. They were invited everywhere, and hostesses were pleased to welcome them whilst congratulating themselves at the same time on their own enlightened attitudes. Now that she thought about it, Eleanor realized that of course Nathaniel Hirsh was a Jew. And at the same time she knew that he was different from the bankers and financiers and manufacturers she had met in the London ballrooms. They were indistinguishable except by name from the old families.
Nathaniel was distinguishable. Nathaniel was distinguishable from everyone else she had met in her life. She didn’t want to label him, Jewish or not, suitable or otherwise. He was, she understood, above that.
When he came to claim her from between Mary and Frances, Eleanor went with him. Mary watched them go out into the garden, and then shrugged her pretty shoulders.
‘Whatever will Aunt Constance think?’ she wondered, and laughed faintly.
Eleanor and Nathaniel walked the shady paths together. They could never remember afterwards what they talked about, only that there was a great deal to say. The sun moved and dipped behind the garden’s fringe of elms.
When it was time for Nathaniel to leave, he took her hand. He lifted it to his mouth and held it there. The beard was soft on her skin, black against the whiteness.
‘May I call again tomorrow?’
‘I go back to Town tomorrow afternoon, with my cousin.’
‘I will call in the morning.’ Nathaniel said.
Eleanor smiled at him, and he saw all the light of the day in her face.
That evening, Eleanor sat down at the writing table in her bedroom and began a letter to Blanche. She had been intending to tell her sister everything; about how Nathaniel Hirsh had appeared in the garden at Fernhaugh and had immediately occupied the middle of her private landscape. He had made her see how bland the scenery was before he came. But then she thought of Blanche and John Leominster together, and of the tentative, sometimes puzzled way they seemed to defer to one another. She had never seen John Leominster look the way Nathaniel had looked at her today, and she didn’t believe Blanche had ever known the mixture of happy anticipation and certainty and dazzlement that she felt tonight.
Eleanor sighed, resting her chin in her hand and thinking of the miraculous day that had produced Nathaniel. Then she put down her pen. She never completed the letter.
Nathaniel went slowly back to Oxford. He was considering the other women he knew, the dark, exuberant daughters of his mother’s friends and the few University ladies and the wives of his colleagues. None of them had Eleanor Holborough’s air of opposites combined, of originality within the conventional, of passion contained by propriety. None of them even seemed to Nathaniel to be as perfectly beautiful as Eleanor.
He had accepted the invitation to Fernhaugh intending to listen and watch, and he came back having fallen in love.
The next morning, when he was leaving her again, Nathaniel kissed Eleanor on the mouth. She turned her face up to his, and kissed him back. There was no reason not to. They were honest with each other. Afterwards, when he had gone, Mary and Frances looked speculatively at her. They were too discreet to ask direct questions, and Eleanor had enough self-possession to give nothing away. But her senses were sharpened by the feelings Nathaniel had stirred in her. She looked around Fernhaugh, and suddenly understood what she saw.
As they were leaving the old house and Norton Ferrier bent his sleek head to kiss Frances Haugh goodbye, Eleanor felt as if her eyes had been opened. There was plenty for her to think about on the journey back to London.
‘What will you tell my mother and Aunt Constance about Mr Hirsh?’ Mary asked slyly.
‘The truth,’ Eleanor was composed. ‘When the right time comes.’
They wrote to each other every day of the next week, letters of deepening affection. Eleanor discovered that Nathaniel was steeped in Goethe and Dante as well as Andrew Marvell, and her own responses seemed stilted and childish in answer to the fluently romantic pages he poured out to her. But Nathaniel answered that he loved her letters, and would keep them for ever. He also warned her, as gently as he could, that there might never come a right time to announce to their families that they intended to marry.
Nathaniel was right to be apprehensive. The news was greeted with even stronger opposition from Levi and Dora Hirsh than from the Holboroughs. The Hirshes wanted a Jewish daughter-in-law and Jewish grandchildren even more than Lady Holborough wanted another Countess in the family.
There were months of separations, and tearful reunions, and bitter family arguments.
In the end, Eleanor’s conviction that all would finally be well was justified. The Holboroughs capitulated first, and agreed that their daughter could throw herself away on a teacher, a foreigner, and a Jew, if that was what she really wished for. The Hirshes took a little longer to give way, but at last they consented to welcome Eleanor into their family. And then, once the decision had been made, she was received with much more warmth than Nathaniel was ever to know from the Holboroughs.
Miss Eleanor Holborough was married quietly in London to Mr Nathaniel Hirsh, of New College, Oxford, on June 28, 1897. It was almost exactly a year since they had met in the garden at Fernhaugh.
The Countess of Leominster was in an interesting condition.
Blanche was at Stretton, preparing for the birth of her first child. When the time came, Eleanor travelled north to be with her sister. She had only been married for three months and it was hard to leave Nathaniel. But Blanche was begging her to go, and Eleanor couldn’t think of refusing.
Nathaniel consoled her, when he took her to the station for the Shrewsbury train, with a promise that while she was away he would find a house for them to buy. Nathaniel had given up his bachelor rooms in college, of course, and they had spent the first weeks of their marriage living in a little rented house at Iffley. Home-making in it had reminded Eleanor of dolls’ house games with Blanche. She protested that she was quite happy where they were, but Nathaniel had other ideas.
‘We need a big house,’ he told her. ‘A proper house, for a family. A real home. I’ll find it, and when you come back you can tell me if you approve. Then all we will need is children to fill it up.’
‘Nathaniel,’ whispered Eleanor, looking around to see if anyone might overhear. But she was only pretending to reprove him. Nathaniel wanted a big family, and she knew quite well that they were doing everything possible to achieve the beginning of one. They did it in the mornings, and in the quiet afternoons when Nathaniel came back from his tutorials, as well as in the proper shelter of the night. They regularly created their own world of feather pillows and tangled black hair and white skin, and Eleanor was surprised by how natural and how good it felt.
On her wedding night she had known next to nothing, and Nathaniel had no more practical experience than she did. But he knew what to do, as he seemed to know everything else, and he guided her confidently.
They learned quickly, together.
Eleanor had been ashamed, at first, of the way her body led her. She had believed that she should be passive and reticent, and meekly let Nathaniel do whatever it was he needed to do to her. But then she had discovered another Eleanor within herself, this Eleanor who would not be subdued except by what her husband did. It was not a matter of allowing him, as she had imagined, but of meeting him halfway. Sometimes, to Nathaniel’s delight, it was more than halfway. Then she heard the other Eleanor scream out in the intensity of her response.
She had been ashamed until Nathaniel told her that there was nothing they could do together, in the seclusion of her bed, that was either wrong or unnatural. She believed him, as she believed everything he said.
‘Come back soon,’ Nathaniel whispered, when he had installed her trunk and boxes in the train with their little Iffley housemaid who would be her lady’s maid at Stretton. ‘I wish I was coming with you.’
He did wish it. He liked to see his wife and her twin sister together. The double vision intensified his pleasure in the secret Eleanor known only to him, as well as tantalizing him with a sense of the other secrets the sisters shared only with each other. He thought, sometimes, of what it would be like to have the two of them together …
‘That would be quite unsuitable,’ Eleanor rebuked him. ‘This is a time for women.’
‘Not when my children are born. You won’t banish me then.’
‘You will have to wait and see what happens when the time comes, Nathaniel.’
The train was on the point of departure. Eleanor smiled up at him from under the brim of her feathered hat. She suspected that they would not have so very long to wait.
‘Come back soon,’ he ordered her. ‘I didn’t marry you to have to spend more than a day without you.’
‘I will,’ she promised him. ‘As soon as I’m sure Blanche doesn’t need me any longer.’
Nathaniel stood on the platform waving until the train was out of sight. At Shrewsbury, Lord Leominster’s groom was waiting with the carriage to drive Eleanor to Stretton.
The approach to the house was by a winding carriage drive through the trees of the park. By this time Eleanor was familiar enough with the view to be ready for the sight of Stretton itself, but the size of it still made her catch her breath at the first glimpse. The trees suddenly gave way to reveal a lake and a bridge and the house standing on a vast slope of grass beyond the water.
The original house was very old, but in the eighteenth century an ambitious Earl had commissioned Robert Adam to extend it and impose the appropriate grandeur on the south front. Now two short wings curved outwards from the main body and a dome had been added to crown the new composition. The centrepiece of this symmetrical arrangement was a porch raised on eight stone pillars, reached by a pair of stone staircases that rose from the gravelled drive. The effect was magnificent, but the Leominster fortunes had never properly recovered from the expense.
The comparison of Stretton’s creamy stone bulk with her cottage at Iffley made Eleanor smile a little as she was handed down at the porch steps.
The butler who swept down to meet her assured her that her ladyship was waiting anxiously upstairs. Eleanor almost ran in his stately wake. She found Blanche in the doorway of her own small drawing room on the first floor, and the sisters fell into each other’s arms.
‘You look so well, and pretty,’ Eleanor exclaimed when they were alone. Blanche did look well, dressed in a loose blue robe that almost hid her bulk. She rested one hand proudly on the summit of it.
‘Sir John says that it will be any day.’ Sir John Williams was her obstetrician. ‘I wish it would come.’
‘And this is so cosy.’ Eleanor walked admiringly round the room. It was decorated in pale blue and eau-de-nil, with watercolour landscapes on the panelled walls. It was new since her last visit, and she thought how well it suited Blanche. The Adam interiors of the rest of the house were very fine, but they had been left untouched for a hundred years. The fabrics were beginning to decay, and there was an air of chilly gloom.
‘John ordered it for me. It is so comfortable to have somewhere pretty and warm to sit. I spend all my days in here. Oh, Eleanor, how glad I am that you are here.’ Blanche sat down on her blue sofa and patted the place beside her. ‘Let me look properly at you.’ With her head on one side, she examined her sister’s face. She saw contentment in every line of it, and something else too. There was a richness, a new lustre that she had not seen before.
‘And I can see that you are well.’
Eleanor smiled. ‘I don’t feel so very magnificent. I suffer from sickness. I believe … Blanchie, I haven’t even told Nathaniel yet, but I think I may be in the same condition as you are.’
After hugging and exclaiming, the sisters sat back to look at one another again. They felt that as married women, both carrying children, there were matters to be discussed that they could not have touched on before, for all their closeness.
Blanche said delicately, ‘Tell me, Eleanor, how do you find the married part of marriage?’ She saw that her sister’s mouth looked fuller than it had been, and her eyes were soft. There was colour warming her neck and cheeks.
‘Surprising, at first,’ Eleanor said. And then, laughing, ‘But afterwards, like … finding out the answer to a riddle. A rather good riddle, with a particularly satisfying solution.’
‘A riddle?’ Blanche was staring at her, uncomprehending.
‘Yes, just that. One that you have half overheard, and never understood before. And you?’
‘John is very good,’ Blanche answered, aware that it was no answer, any more than Eleanor’s had seemed. But John was good, she told herself. He did not trouble her so very often, and when he did materialize in her bedroom, sliding in in the darkness to lie briefly on top of her, he seemed so insubstantial, so thin and light that she wondered if he was completely there. Afterwards he would whisper to her, ‘I’m sorry, my dear. Will you forgive me?’
Blanche had no idea why her forgiveness should be necessary, because she had not felt particularly violated, but she gave it readily. She was fond of her husband, and recognized his kindness.
After waiting a moment, Eleanor realized that Blanche would say no more. She murmured, ‘Yes. I’m sure he is.’ She was remembering the letter she had started to write to Blanche on the night of meeting Nathaniel. She had known then that it was not the right thing to finish and post it.
Eleanor stood up and went to Blanche. She kissed the top of her head, in the middle where the dark hair parted to reveal the white skin beneath. Then she wandered to the window, and looked down at the wide park.
‘Will the baby be an heir for John and all this?’
‘I am quite sure it is a boy, and so is John,’ Blanche said composedly.
Blanche’s son was born a week later, and named Hugo John. By family tradition he took his father’s second title, Viscount Culmington.
It was an easy, uncomplicated birth. Eleanor stayed with her sister until she was well enough to leave her rooms, and then she travelled back to Nathaniel with her own news.
Seven months later, in April 1898, Jacob Nathaniel Hirsh was born in Oxford, arriving as quickly and easily as his cousin Hugo had done.
Before his son’s birth Nathaniel had found the family house he had always intended to own. It was to the north of city, in the Woodstock Road, in the heart of an area of solid new houses colonized by the first generation of University dons who were allowed to marry and live outside their colleges. It was a tall red-brick building that reared up from its newly planted garden and loomed over the quiet road like a Gothic castle in miniature. There were arched windows at a dozen different levels, doors in unexpected recesses and a round turret topped off with its own pinnacle of purplish slate. Inside there was a good deal of stained glass and polished mahogany, and short flights of shallow stairs leading from one mystifying level to the next. It had ten inconveniently sited bedrooms and only one bathroom; it cost much more money than they could afford; and Eleanor and Nathaniel both loved it.
The new house stood on an oddly shaped three-quarters of an acre plot, which Eleanor claimed at once as her own with the garden at Fernhaugh as her model. By the time Jacob was born, she felt her house and her garden fitting around her as comfortably as a shell enclosing an oyster. She told Nathaniel that he had better find that it suited him too, because she had no intention of ever living anywhere else.
‘It is too big,’ Nathaniel protested. ‘All these rooms, just for us and Jakie and his nurse and a couple of maids. We need more children, Eleanor. We need to fill up the house. I want a dozen children, a whole team, a chamber orchestra.’
Eleanor laughed at him. ‘A dozen? How will we feed them all?’
The Hirshes had very little money.
‘Leave that to me. I shall be Professor Hirsh before you know it.’
Eleanor didn’t doubt it. She was proud of her husband’s growing academic reputation, and she was glad to see the students who began to flock to their house to hear him talk.
‘A chamber orchestra it shall be then,’ she agreed with mock obedience. Nathaniel loved music almost as much as he loved books.
