The writer reflected on the relative harmlessness of what she was doing as she waited on the step for the doorbell to be answered. It was a cold and windy autumn afternoon, and the trees that bordered the canal in Little Venice were shedding their leaves into the water. She had turned away to look at the play of light in the ripples drawn behind a barge when the door opened at last behind her.

There was a smiling nurse in a blue dress. ‘Mrs Ainger, hello there. Come in, now.’

‘How is she today?’ Elizabeth Ainger asked.

‘Not so bad at all. Quite clear in the head, as a matter of fact. She even asked when you were coming.’

‘She’s getting used to me,’ the biographer said. ‘I’m glad it’s one of her good days.’

The nurse showed her into a drawing room at the rear of the house with a view of a small garden through double doors. There were porcelain ornaments arranged on the marble mantelpiece, a little blue painting of an interior hanging above them, embroidered cushions and faded rose-patterned loose covers. These neat, traditional furnishings were faintly at odds with the picture that hung on the wall behind the old lady’s chair. It was a double portrait, in oils, of two young women. They were looking away from each other, out of the frame of the picture, and there was tension in every line of their bodies. The painter’s peculiarly hectic style owed something to Picasso, and something to Stanley Spencer.

It was so quiet in the room, away from the noise of the traffic, that the occupant might have been sitting in some cottage in the country instead of in the middle of London.

‘Hello, Aunt Clio,’ Elizabeth said. The nurse withdrew, and closed the door behind her.

The tiny old woman in the velvet-upholstered chair was not really Elizabeth’s aunt, but her grandmother’s first cousin. But it was to ‘Aunt Clio’s’ house in Oxford that Elizabeth had been taken on visits with her mother when she was a little girl. She could just remember the rooms, with their forbidding shelves of dark books, and her childish impression that Aunt Clio was important, but in some way not easy.

When Elizabeth was seven, her American father had taken his wife and daughter back to live in Oregon, and there had only been birthday cards and Christmas presents from Oxford after that. By the time Elizabeth was grown up herself, and had come back to live in the country of her birth, the links had been all but broken. Until this series of visits had begun, the two women had not met for thirty years.

Clio turned her head a fraction to look at her visitor. ‘It’s you, is it?’

Elizabeth smiled and shrugged, deprecatingly held out her tape-recorder.

‘I am afraid so. Do you feel too tired to talk today?’

‘I am not in the least tired.’

She did not look it, either. Her body was tiny and frail, but her eyes were bright and sharp like fish caught in their nets of wrinkles. She watched Elizabeth Ainger sitting down, adopting a familiar position in the chair opposite to her own, and fiddling with her little tape-recorder.

‘I just wonder why you are not bored to death with all these old tales?’

With a show of cheerful patience the younger woman answered, ‘You can’t tell me anything that will bore me. I am your biographer, remember?’

That was the lie, but it came out fluently enough.

The biography was not of her relative, Clio Hirsh, although she would not have been an inappropriate subject, but of Clio’s first cousin.

Lady Grace Brock, née Stretton, was Elizabeth’s maternal grand-mother. She was the daughter of an Earl, a famous socialite in her day and then one of the first women Members of Parliament.

Elizabeth had never met her, but she was fascinated by her. And her enthusiasm had communicated itself to her publisher when they had met to discuss over lunch what Elizabeth’s next project might be as a middle-range, moderately successful author of popular biographies.

‘Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard did well enough,’ the published mused. ‘Although your grandmother is not quite so well known, of course. Why don’t you put some material together for us to have a look at?’

Elizabeth’s mother and the rest of the family had warned her at the outset that Clio was famously reluctant to talk about her cousin and friend. The defences that the old lady duly put up against Elizabeth’s first casual enquiries were infuriating, and impregnable, but she needed her co-operation, and so Elizabeth had pretended that it was a family biography that she was researching, with particular emphasis on Clio’s own life.

Elizabeth was invited to call at the house in Little Venice. The first visit had led to a series of interviews, and Elizabeth had patiently waited and listened.

It would not matter if the finished book was not what had been promised. Books took a long time to write, and Clio was very old and no longer reliably clear in her own mind.

Clio said irritably, ‘I bore myself. Who could possibly want to read anything about me? I wish I hadn’t agreed to this rigmarole.’

‘But you did agree.’

‘I know that. And having agreed to it, I am doing it.’ She was tart, as she often was on her lucid days. Elizabeth knew that Clio did not care for her, but she took the trouble to conceal her own reciprocal irritation.

‘We were talking about Blanche and Eleanor, last time I was here,’ Elizabeth prompted.

‘You know it all. You’ve seen all their letters, the papers. What more do you want to hear?’

‘Just what you remember. Only that.’

The old woman sighed. She was almost ninety. She remembered so many things but she had forgotten more. The firm connective tissue of memory that once held the flesh of her life together had all but dissolved. There were only incidents to recall now, isolated like the tips of submerged rocks rearing out of a wide sea.

Then, in a stronger voice, Clio suddenly said, ‘I remember my Aunt Blanche’s scent. White lilac, and burnt hair. They frizzed their hair, you know, in those days. With curling tongs that the maid heated red-hot in the fire. I remember the smell of burning hair.’

Elizabeth pressed the record button, and then sat quietly, listening as Clio talked. This was the pattern of her visits.

One

The old woman sat propped in her nest of cushions and rugs. Her hands rested like small ivory carvings on the rubbed velvet arms of the chair. The visitor waited, watching her to see if she would doze, or sit in silence, or if today would be a talking day.

Clio said to Elizabeth, not looking at her but away somewhere else, a long way off, ‘I remember the holidays. There were always wonderful holidays.’ She tilted her head, listening to something that reminded her.

When she thought about it, she supposed that had been Nathaniel’s doing. Nathaniel applied the same principles to holidays as to his work. He could turn the radiance of his enthusiasm equally on the business of enjoyment or the pleasures of academic discipline. And Nathaniel’s enthusiasm infected them all, all of his children. When the time came for the family migrations, excitement would fill the red-brick house with high-pitched twittering, like real birds. Clio could hear the starlings out in the garden now. It must be their chorus that had taken her back. The nurse would have tipped the crusts of the breakfast toast on the bird-table.

‘Where did you go?’ Cressida’s daughter Elizabeth asked.

‘Different places.’ Clio glanced at her, suddenly sly. ‘Grace and the others used to come with us, too.’ It amused her to see how the mention of Grace sharpened the other’s attention. It always did.

There had been different holidays, but almost always beside the sea. They would take a house, or two houses, if one was not big enough for Hirshes and Strettons together, with their retinue of nursemaids and attendants. The children and their mothers would stay there all the long summer, and the two fathers would visit when they could.

Only they almost never came at the same time. Nathaniel would go away for some of those summer vacations on reading parties with his undergraduates, or on visits to Paris and Berlin. And John Leominster had the estate at Stretton to attend to, and business in London, and the affairs of his club.

It was Blanche and Eleanor who were always there.

Clio and Grace and the boys ran over the expanses of rawly glittering sand, or hung over the rock pools, or dragged their shrimping nets through fringes of seaweed before lifting them in arcs of diamond spray to examine the catch. It was the mothers they always ran back to, to show off the mollusc or sidling crab, Jake pounding ahead with Julius at his heels, and shoulder to shoulder, the two girls, with their skirts gathered up in one hand and their sharp elbows sticking out. If one of them could manage a dig at the other, to make her swerve or miss her footing, then so much the better. It would mean reaching the boys first, having the chance to blurt out with them the news of the tiny discovery, while the loser came sulkily behind, forced to pretend that nothing mattered less.

The two nannies sat with the nursemaid in a sheltered corner at the top of the beach. The little brothers and sisters, Hirshes and Strettons, played at their feet or slept in their perambulators. These babies were beneath the attention of the bigger children. The flying feet swept past, sending up small plumes of silvery sand, heading for the mothers.

Blanche and Eleanor sat a little distance apart, beneath a complicated canvas awning. They were protected from the sun and the sea breeze by panels of canvas that unrolled from the roof-edge. The little pavilion was carried down to the beach every morning and erected by Blanche’s chauffeur, who also brought down their canvas chairs and spread out the rugs on which they rested their feet. One year Hugo Stretton had made a red knight’s pennant to fly from the top of the supporting pole. This spot of scarlet was the focus of the beach, however far the children wandered. The twin sisters sat beneath it in the canvas shade, watching their families and mildly gossiping. Sometimes there was a husband nearby, either Nathaniel Hirsh, with his black beard bristling over a book, or John Leominster, bowling at Hugo who stood in front of a makeshift wicket and squinted fiercely at the spinning ball. But if neither husband was there, Blanche and Eleanor were equally content. They found one another’s company perfectly satisfactory, as they had always done.

It was always Jake who reached them first.

‘Look at this, Mama, Aunt Blanche. Look what we found.’

Then Julius would plunge down into the sand beside him. ‘I found it. It came up in my net.’

And one of the girls would drop between the two of them, panting for breath and grinning in her triumph. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Can we keep it for a pet? I’ll look after it, I promise I will.’

The second girl would stumble up, red-faced and pouting. ‘Don’t be silly, you can’t keep things like that for pets. They aren’t domestic,’ Clio would say scornfully, because it was the only option left open to her. It was usually Clio. Grace was quicker and more determined in getting what she wanted. She usually won the races. It isn’t fair, Clio had thought, almost from the time she had been able to think. Jake is my brother and Julius is my twin. They’re both mine, Grace is only an outsider.

But Grace never behaved like an outsider, and never behaved as if she owed her Hirsh cousins any thanks for her inclusion in their magic circle. She took it loftily, as her right.

The children knelt in a ring, at their mothers’ feet. Jake put his hand into the net and lifted out their catch to show it off. Blanche and Eleanor bent their identical calm faces and padded coiffures over him, ready to admire.

One of them gave a faint cry. ‘It is quite a big one. Don’t let it nip you, Jacob, will you?’

Hugo was digging in the sand nearby. His curiosity at last overcame him and he left his complicated layout of moats and battlements and strolled over to them, his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers.

‘It’s only a stupid crab,’ he observed.

‘Stupid yourself,’ Clio and Grace rounded on him, united in defence. ‘Just because you didn’t catch it.’

‘I wouldn’t have bothered. It’ll die in five minutes, in this sun.’

Hugo turned his back on them, returning to his solitary game. Hugo was Grace’s elder brother. He was good as an extra player in field games, or for Racing Demon, or to perform the less coveted roles in the rambling plays that Clio and Julius wrote, but he never belonged to the circle. There was room for only the four of them within it.

Hugo would have said, ‘I’m not interested in stupid clubs. They’re for little girls.’

Knowing better, none of them would have bothered to contradict him.

Eleanor or Blanche would say, soothingly, ‘It is very handsome. Look at those claws. But I think Hugo may be right, you know. It will be happier under a rock, somewhere near the water. Shall I walk over there with you, so we can make sure it finds a safe home?’

Then, whichever mother it happened to be would stand up, smoothing the folds of her narrow bell skirt and the tucked and pearl-buttoned front of her white blouse. If it was a hot day she would shake out the folds of her little parasol and tilt it over her dark head, before following them across the shimmering sand. The hem of her skirt trailed on it, giving a rhythmic, languid whisper. The mothers’ feet were always invisible, even beside the sea. Even though she knew Blanche really wore elegant narrow shoes in suede or glacé kid, Grace used to imagine that her mother’s gliding step was the result of wheels, smoothly revolving beneath her rustling gowns.

When they came to the rocks the children hunched together, watching as Jake slowly opened his hands and laid the crab in the narrow slice of shade. The creature seemed to rise on its toes, like a ballerina on points, before it darted sideways. They watched until the crimped edge of the green and black shell disappeared under the ledge. Julius flattened himself on his stomach and peered after it, but he couldn’t see the stalky eyes looking out at him.

‘It’s gone,’ they said sadly.

The mother or aunt reassured them. ‘It will be happier, you know. A crab isn’t like the dogs, or Grace’s rabbits.’ And, seeing their miserable faces, she would laugh her pretty silvery laugh, and tell them to run over to Nanny and ask if they might walk to the wooden kiosk at the end of the beach road for lemonade.

When was that? Clio asked herself. Which summer, of all those summers? Grace and Julius and I must have been nine, and Jake eleven.

Nineteen ten.

And where?

It might have been Cromer, or Hunstanton. Not France, that was certain, although there had been two summers on the wide beaches of the Normandy coast. That had been Nathaniel’s doing, too. He had made the plans, and chosen the solid hotels with faded sun awnings and ancient, slow-footed waiters. He had supervised the exodus of the families, marshalling porters to convey brass-bound trunks, seemingly dozens of them, and booming instructions in rapid French to douaniers and drivers. It had all seemed very exotic. Clio was proud of her big, red-mouthed, polyglot father. Uncle John Leominster seemed a dry stick beside him, and Clio glanced sidelong at Grace to make sure that she too was registering the contrast.

But if Grace noticed anything, she gave no sign of it. She would look airily around her, interested but not impressed. Her own father was the Earl of Leominster, milord anglais, and she herself was Lady Grace Stretton. That was superiority enough. Clio writhed under the injustice of it, her pride in Nathaniel momentarily forgotten. That was how it was.

Eleanor and Blanche enjoyed Trouville. They liked the early evening promenade when French families walked out in chattering groups, airing their fashionable clothes. The Hirshes and Strettons joined the pageant, the sisters shrewdly appraising the latest styles. The Countess of Leominster might buy her gowns in Paris but Eleanor, a don’s wife, couldn’t hope to. She would take the news back to her dressmaker in Oxford.

The two of them drew glances wherever they went. They were an arresting sight, gliding together in their pongee or tussore silks, their identical faces framed by huge hats festooned with drooping masses of flowers or feathers. Their children walked more stiffly, constrained by their holiday best, under the benign eye of whichever husband happened to be present. Grace liked to walk with Jake, which left Julius and Clio together. Clio was happy enough with that, but she would have preferred it if Jake could have been at her other side.

They were all happy, except for Uncle John, who did not care for Abroad. Blanche never wanted to oppose him, and so the experiment was only repeated once. After that, they returned to Norfolk.

Nineteen eleven was the year of the boat.

The summer holiday began the same way as all the others. The Hirshes and their nanny and two maids travelled from Oxford to London by train, and stayed the night in the Strettons’ town house in Belgrave Square. It was an exciting reunion for the cousins, who had not seen each other since the Easter holiday at Stretton. Clio and Grace hugged each other, and then Grace kissed Jake and Julius in turn, shy kisses with her eyes hidden by her eyelashes, making the boys blush a little. Hugo watched from a safe distance. He was already at Eton, and considered himself grown up. The other four sat on the beds in the night nursery, locking their circle tight again after the long separation.

The next day, the two families set off by train from Liverpool Street station. There were three reserved compartments. The parents travelled in one, the children and nannies in another, and the maids in the third. The nannies pinned big white sheets over the seats, so the childrens’ hair and clothes didn’t touch them.

‘You never know who else has been sitting there before you, Miss Clio,’ Nanny Cooper said, compressing her lips. They ate their lunch out of a big wicker picnic basket, and afterwards the smaller children fell asleep. Tabitha Hirsh, the youngest, was still a tiny baby.

At the station at the other end, the Leominster chauffeur was waiting to meet them. He had driven up from London with part of the luggage.

That year, there was one big house overlooking the sea. It was a maze of rooms opening out of each other, with a glassed-in sun room to one side that smelt of dried seaweed and rubber overshoes. The children ran through the rooms, shouting their discoveries to each other while the maids and nannies unpacked.

Later, in the early evening, there was the first scramble down on to the beach. The clean air was full of salt and the cries of gulls. Nathaniel put on his panama hat and went with the children, letting them run ahead to the water’s edge and not calling them back to walk properly as the nannies would have done. From the high-water mark, where the girls hesitated in fear of wetting their white shoes, they looked back and saw Nathaniel talking to a fisherman.

‘What’s he doing?’ Julius called. ‘Can we go fishing?’

When he rejoined them, Nathaniel was beaming. ‘Surprise,’ he announced, waving his big hands. The children surged around him.

‘What is it? What?’

‘Look and see.’

They followed him across the sand. There was an outcrop of rock draped with pungent bladder wrack, and an iron ring was let into the rock. A rusty stain bled beneath it. A length of rope was hitched through the ring, and the other end of it was secured to a small blue dinghy beached on the sand. A herring gull perched briefly on the boat’s prow, and then lifted away again.

Grace stooped to read the faded lettering. ‘It’s called the Mabel.’

‘Your Mabel, for the summer,’ Nathaniel told her.

‘Ours? Our own?’

‘I’ll teach you to row.’

Hugo was already fumbling with the rope. ‘I can row.’

Nathaniel and the fisherman eased the dinghy down to the water’s edge, steadying it when the keel lifted free and bobbed on the ripples.

‘Six of us. You’ll have to sit still. Hugo in the front there, Jake and Julius in the middle. Leave room for the oarsmen. The girls at the stern.’ He ordered them fluently, and they scrambled to his directions, even Hugo. The fisherman in his tall rubber waders lifted Clio and swung her over the little gulf of water.

‘There, miss. Now your sister’s turn.’ He went back for Grace, and hoisted her too.

‘She’s my cousin, not my sister,’ Clio told him quickly.

‘Is that so? She’s like enough to be your twin.’

‘He’s my real twin,’ Clio pointed at Julius.

‘But he’s nothing like so pretty,’ the man twinkled at her. Clio was sufficiently disarmed by the compliment to forget the mistake. Nathaniel dipped the oars, and the Mabel slid forward over the lazy swell.

There had been boat rides before, but none had seemed as magical as the first trip in their own Mabel. They bobbed out over the green water, into the realm of the gulls. Only a few yards separated them from the prosaic shore, but they felt part of another world. They could look back at the old one, at the holiday house diminished by blue distance and at the white speck of a nanny’s apron passing in front of it. Out here there were the cork markers of lobster pots, a painted buoy with another gull perching on it, and the depths of the mysterious water.

Grace leant to one side so that her fingers dipped into the waves. She sighed with pleasure. It was the first day of the holidays. There were six whole weeks to enjoy before she would be returned to Miss Alcott and the tedium of the schoolroom at Stretton. Jake and Julius were here. She was happy.

Nathaniel bent over the oars. The dinghy skimmed along, and the sea breeze blew the railway fumes out of their heads.

Jake said, ‘I can see Aunt Blanche. I think she’s waving.’

Nathaniel laughed. He had a big, noisy laugh. ‘I’m sure she’s waving. It’s our signal to make for dry land.’

He paddled vigorously with one oar and the boat swung in a circle. When it was broadside to the sea a wave larger than the others slapped against the side and sprayed over them. The girls shrieked with delight and shook out the skirts of their white dresses.

‘Rules of the sea,’ Nathaniel boomed, as the Mabel rose on the crest of the next wave and swept towards the beach.

The rules were that no child was allowed to take out the dinghy without an adult watching. The girls were not allowed to row unless one of the fathers came in the boat. The boys would be permitted to row themselves, once they had passed a swimming test that would be set by Nathaniel.

The boys often bathed in the summer holidays, wearing long navy-blue woollen bathing suits that buttoned on the shoulders. To their disappointment the girls were not allowed to do the same, because Blanche and Eleanor had never done so and didn’t consider it desirable for their daughters. They had to content themselves with removing their shoes and long stockings and paddling in the shallows.

‘Are the rules understood?’ Nathaniel demanded ferociously.

‘We understand,’ they answered in unison.

The keel of the dinghy ran into the sand like a spoon digging into sugar. The fisherman had gone home. The boys jumped ashore, Nathaniel lifted Clio and Grace launched herself into Jake’s arms. He staggered a little with the weight of her, and a wave ran up and licked over his shoes.

They all laughed, even Clio.

As they trudged back up to the house Grace said to Clio, ‘I must say, I think your father can be splendid sometimes.’

‘So do I,’ Clio answered with pride.

The days of the holiday slipped by, as they always did.

John Leominster was in Scotland for the shooting. Nathaniel went away to London, then came back again. Blanche and Eleanor stayed put, happy to be together, as they had been since babyhood. They wrote their letters side by side in the morning room, walked together in the afternoons, took tea with their children when they came in from the beach and listened to the news of the day, and after they had changed in the evenings they ate dinner alone together in the candlelit dining room, the food served to them by the manservant who came from Stretton for the holiday.

The children, from elsewhere in the house, could often hear the sound of their laughter. Clio and Grace listened, their admiration touched with resentment at their own exclusion. They knew that the two of them could never be so tranquil alone together, without Jake, without Julius.

For the children there were races on the beach, picnics and drives and hunts for cowrie shells, and, that year, rowing in the Mabel. The boys passed their swimming tests, and became confident oarsmen. They learnt to dive from the dinghy, shouting to each other as they balanced precariously and then launched themselves, setting the little boat wildly rocking. The girls could only watch enviously from the waterline, listening to the splashes and spluttering.

‘I could swim if they would just let me try,’ Grace muttered.

‘And so could I, easily,’ Clio affirmed. ‘Why isn’t Pappy here, so that we could at least go in the boat with them?’

They weren’t looking at each other when Grace said, ‘We should go anyway. Prove we can, and then they’ll have no reason to stop us any more, will they?’

‘I don’t think we should. Not without asking.’

Grace laughed scornfully. ‘If we ask, we’ll be told no. Don’t you know anything about older people? Anyway, Jake won’t let anything happen.’

It was always Jake they looked to. Not Hugo, even though Hugo was the eldest.

‘I’m going to go,’ Grace announced. ‘You needn’t, if you’re scared.’

‘I never said I was scared.’

They did look at each other then. The fisherman had been right, they were alike as sisters. Not identical like their mothers, the resemblance was not as close as that, but they had the same straight noses and blue-grey eyes, and the same thick, dark hair springing back from high foreheads. When they looked they seemed to see themselves in mirror fashion, and neither of them had ever quite trusted the reflection.

Grace turned away first. She lifted her arm, and waved it in a wide arc over her head. The white sleeve of her middy-blouse fluttered like a truce signal.

‘Jake,’ she called. ‘Ja-ake, Julius, come here, won’t you?’

Jake’s black head, glistening wet like a seal’s, appeared alongside the dinghy. He rested his arms on the stern, hoisting the upper half of his body out of the water. He was almost thirteen. His shoulders were beginning to broaden noticeably under the blue woollen bathing suit.

‘What?’

Hugo and Julius bobbed up alongside him. Hugo’s head looked very blond and square alongside his cousins’.

Grace’s arm signal changed to a beckoning curl. ‘Come in to shore for a minute.’

Jake began lazily kicking. Julius and then Hugo dived and swam. Under Jake’s propulsion the Mabel drifted towards the beach. Clio thought, They always do what she wants. She turned to look up the sand. The two nannies were sitting as usual on a blanket on the lee of the sea-wall. Tabitha’s perambulator stood close by. The two younger Strettons, Thomas and Phoebe, were playing in the sand. They were turning sandcastles out of seawater-rusted tin buckets. Hills the chauffeur had put up the canvas awning ready for the mothers, but they had not come down yet. They would still be attending to their volumes of correspondence. Their empty steamer chairs sat side by side, and Hugo’s red pennant flew bravely above them in the stiffening breeze.

Clio saw the fisherman a little further up the beach. He was busy with his coils of nets.

When she looked behind her again it was to see the boys plunging through the shallows in sparkling jets of spray. Mabel rocked enticingly at the end of her painter.

‘It isn’t fair,’ she heard Grace saying. ‘You have all the fun in the boat. I think you should take me out now.’

‘Us,’ Clio insisted, and Grace looked at her but said nothing. She stood characteristically with her hands on her hips, her chin pushed out. Hugo laughed and Julius began to recite Nathaniel’s rules of the sea. Jake stood and looked at Grace, smiling a little.

Grace fixed on him. ‘There are grown-up people on the beach, the nannies and the fisherman. You three have been rowing and swimming all week. What difference will there be just in having us in the boat? And once we’ve been, they won’t be able to stop us going again, will they? The rules are petty and unfair.’

‘That’s true, at least.’ Support came from Hugo, who was never anxious to accept Nathaniel’s jurisdiction.

‘But we were told,’ Julius began.

‘Stay here with Clio, then.’

The twins shook their heads, and Grace smiled once more at Jake. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun for all of us to go out together, on our own?’