In a dip, Artemis sat and reined back, and the horse came down through his paces to a perfect halt. They stood together in silence for a moment, a quiet broken only by the faint sigh of the breeze in the grasses. Being alone, Artemis laughed aloud with the joy of the moment, and leaned forward to wrap both arms around the neck of the horse, who, in his turn snorted and stamped at the ground with one hoof, proclaiming his own love of life.
‘Come on!’ Artemis called to him, as she collected up her reins. ‘Let’s see exactly what sort of racer you are.’
She turned the horse once, as if to gather the courage for them both, before setting him off up the gentle slope at a canter which in six strides she had got him to switch to a gallop. This was a very different game they were playing now, this was no dressage canter, no polite park pace, no handy dawdle. This was Epsom, this was Aintree, this was the hill at Cheltenham. This was three-quarters of a ton of horse travelling nearly as fast as her little blue car, only with no brakes to stop him, just a one-and-a-half-legged, seven and a bit stones girl to pull him up. There was no thrill like it, and Artemis knew it, as the gentle breeze which had turned into a wind whipped through her hair and smarted her eyes. Longer and longer strode the horse as faster and faster his rider urged him, until finally the hill started to run out in front of them and turn to just sky.
As soon as she asked him, the horse began to pull up, happily and easily. In a moment they were down to a trot and then a walk, ambling along the ridge while they both caught their breath. Then they stopped, and looked down at the green country below them.
‘I love you, horse,’ Artemis said, pulling his ears and stroking his neck. ‘I love you as I love nothing else.’
They were all to go to the party. Artemis insisted. Cousin Rose protested she was far too old for it, but Artemis was at her most resolute.
‘Dear – it’s fancy dress, darling!’ Cousin Rose complained.
‘When isn’t it?’ Artemis replied, with unconcealed contempt. ‘It seems no-one can ever give a party without making everyone dress up.’
‘But God love us, what shall I go as?’ Cousin Rose enquired. ‘I’ve been to so many of the confounded things, I’ve been as everything!’
‘Go as Tutti,’ Artemis suggested. ‘I’ll bet you’ve never been as your man.’
Cousin Rose was greatly taken with that notion, and at once forgot all her objections, as she hurried off to find her butler to break the news and receive instruction as to how best to dress herself.
‘What about me?’ Ellie asked.
‘You,’ Artemis replied, ‘can go and invite Hugo.’
‘Why me?’ Ellie objected. ‘Why not both of us?’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Eleanor. It doesn’t need two people to deliver an invitation. And while you do, I’m going up to the attic to look for things.’
Ellie took the car and drove down to Hugo’s caravan, a part of her hoping he was out so that she could just leave the written invite, and a part of her hoping that he was in, so that she could see him.
He was there, sitting on the step of the caravan, drawing yet another view. He saw Ellie long before she saw him, because she was concentrating on her driving, and he was only pretending to draw, because once he had seen her, all else went from his mind. She was so beautiful she rendered him not only speechless on occasions but often thoughtless as well. And so he pretended to draw, while he waited and longed for her finally to arrive.
All the time, as he was painting her portrait, Hugo had wondered how best to describe the irradiance of her beauty, but had as yet not found the perfect adjective. She wasn’t gorgeous. Gorgeous girls were redheads, sexy, opulent. Nor was she ravishing. Ravishing girls wore a lot of makeup, and were fast. He had toyed with devastating, but the remaining image was always one of destruction, of a chaos created by a sultry blonde. Exquisite was too fragile, and heavenly too effete. Dazzling was sheer Hollywood, sublime suggested an experience rather than a person, faultless was feeble, superb was too sporting, and wonderful belonged to the make-believe world of advertising. She was all of these words, certainly, every one of them, but she was not any one of them in particular.
‘You shouldn’t frown like that,’ she said, as she pulled the car up in front of him. ‘You’ll get tramlines.’
‘I’ve been trying to find a word to describe you,’ Hugo replied, getting up to go and open her car door. ‘And at last I think I’ve found it. You’re beautiful.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Ellie.
Which were the last words Ellie spoke for what seemed like an eternity, because seconds later Hugo kissed her.
Afterwards Ellie tried to recollect the sensation, of spinning, of a dark crimson delight, darkness, and the thrill of it all. But just as Hugo had failed in his search for the word which would perfectly describe Ellie, Ellie found nothing else in her head to say about her trip to the stars except that she had been kissed.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ was all she eventually found to say, as she stood looking up at the person who’d made her feel this way.
‘I agree,’ Hugo said. ‘That was probably the worst thing I ever did in my whole life.’
Ellie sat down suddenly on the wooden steps of the caravan and rubbed her puzzled forehead with one hand. ‘You really shouldn’t have. I mean it.’
Hugo sat down beside her. ‘I had to,’ he told her.
‘Why?’
‘Because I wanted to.’
‘But you shouldn’t have.’ Ellie felt ridiculous, inexplicably sad, when in reality she should have been dancing. ‘I’ve never been kissed by anyone before,’ she said.
‘I have,’ Hugo replied. ‘Plenty of people. And I’ll tell you something. About all those kisses. I’ve forgotten them all.’
‘Perhaps it’s just being kissed,’ Ellie added hopelessly. ‘Perhaps first kisses do this to people.’
‘Do what?’
Ellie paused, and then held out one of her hands. It was shaking visibly.
‘Me, too,’ Hugo held out his own.
‘Anyway,’ Ellie said, doing her best to recover her senses, ‘this isn’t why I’m here. I came down here to ask you to a party.’ She turned back to the car and produced the invitation, which Hugo took and stared at without seeing the words. ‘Well?’ Ellie asked him. ‘Will you come?’
‘Yes,’ Hugo agreed. ‘But only if you’ll marry me.’
Ellie’s eyes widened as far as they would go. ‘That’s not funny,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t intended to be.’
Ellie stared at him in silence.
‘So that’s OK, is it?’ she asked. ‘You’ll come to the party?’
‘Yes,’ Hugo replied. ‘I will, if you’ll marry me.’
A moment later and she was gone, into the car, having finally driven off after a desperate and frantic attempt to do everything at once, slam the door, start it and engage gear, all at the same time.
Hugo watched her go and then sat down and sighed. ‘It’s the only solution,’ he said to the donkey in the field.
Ellie danced with everyone except Hugo. She hadn’t spoken to him since her visit to his caravan, and she didn’t address one word to him all the way to Sneem, a journey undertaken in Cousin Rose’s motor car, the big black Humber which lay under its cover for most of the year in the garage, generally only to be brought out for what Cousin Rose described as ‘comings and goings’.
Tutti was at the wheel, in his old regimental uniform, his butler’s livery having been purloined by his employer, who was now dressed as him. Artemis had got herself up as a more than passable Charlie Chaplin, a costume which cleverly allowed her full use of her stick. Hugo, with considerable help from Artemis, was dressed as a lookalike Douglas Fairbanks pirate, and Ellie, again thanks to Artemis’s skills, looked quite and utterly bewitching as Coppelia, with chalk white face, rouged cheeks, and carefully painted on eyelashes.
There was a sense of high excitement on the journey across, with Cou
sin Rose at her most garrulous, and Artemis at her most provocative. Everything Hugo said she disputed or challenged, and for the most while the two of them were locked in controversy, a state which, to judge from Hugo’s hoots of laughter and Artemis’s persistence, both of them enjoyed enormously.
For her part, Ellie sat quietly in the corner of the back seat, watching Ireland darkening in the September sunset, trying to sort herself out. She was still undecided as to whether or not Hugo’s proposal had been real or mock, a conclusion she found all the more difficult to reach since in the land in which she was now living everything that happened seemed to be all part of a tease. ‘Ah sure ’t’was only a tease,’ her cousin was forever saying long after having led Ellie up yet another garden path. ‘You didn’t think I was serious?’ And although Hugo wasn’t Irish, even so it seemed to Ellie he too had become touched with the feyness that was so universal it surely had to be in the very air they were all breathing. She looked at him now, from the corner of her eye, as he sat laughing and making merry with Cousin Rose and Artemis. He didn’t look in the least like a man with serious intentions. A man with matrimony really on his mind would hardly be sitting in the back of a car doubled-up with laughter as his hostess failed yet again to cope with one of his terrible tongue twisters.
The party, held in a ramshackle castle on the edge of a large dark lake, was astonishing, and, unsurprisingly, quite unlike anything Ellie had ever attended before. It was hosted by an extraordinarily beautiful and very eccentric White Russian princess, who was called by everyone, and quite inexplicably, Babs. She was over six feet tall, smoked cigars, and was dressed so they learned as Shirley Temple had been in Glad Rags to Riches, in a huge peek-a-boo bonnet, baby socks and shoes, a white scooped-neck top decorated with leaves, and a pair of sequinned diapers, held together at the front with an enormous gilded safety pin. She appeared never to speak to anyone, but glided constantly through her assembled guests, suddenly choosing someone of either sex to seize by the shoulders and kiss passionately on the mouth. In her drawing room was an enormous church organ, which she played occasionally throughout the evening, and whenever she did so, a succession of outraged cats appeared howling and hissing from the mass of iron piping.
In the great hall a game of cricket was in progress, with a full complement of players, and an attentive and appreciative crowd of deck-chaired spectators.
‘What fun,’ Artemis remarked as they arrived and Hugo fielded a well struck cover drive. ‘I wish we’d had some of these sort of things at home.’
‘Was your house as big as this?’ Ellie wondered as they explored all the rooms.
‘Yes,’ Artemis replied. ‘Bigger really. And it was always full of people. But nothing ever really went on, nothing fun.’
There was music, too, besides Babs’s sombre organ recitals, to which none of the guests paid the slightest attention. There was a danceband in the dining hall, and a trio of violin, accordion and flute in the kitchen, playing Gaelic music to which an enormous red-bearded man would sing at irregular intervals, lifting one foot to knee height in order to stamp in time on the floor.
Ellie found the whole atmosphere completely intoxicating, and even Artemis’s mask of indifference soon slipped.
But it was Hugo dancing with Artemis that Ellie would remember always. She and Artemis had been watching the cricket match in the hall, where a tall and elegant elderly gentleman dressed as a rabbit had just scored a text book half century. Artemis was explaining the niceties of the game to Ellie when Hugo had reappeared by their sides.
‘I think I like this one,’ Artemis said, listening as the band struck up ‘Body and Soul’.
‘So come and dance to it then,’ Hugo asked her.
For a moment Ellie thought Artemis was going to hit Hugo, as her blue eyes darkened and Ellie saw her make little fists of her hands.
‘No thank you,’ she said finally instead, and picked up where she had left off explaining cricket to Ellie.
‘Please,’ said Hugo. ‘Please, Tom.’
‘Go and ask someone else,’ Artemis replied. ‘Ask Ellie.’
‘I don’t want to ask anyone else, Tom,’ Hugo said. ‘I want this dance with you. Besides, Ellie keeps refusing.’
There was complete silence between the three of them, Artemis for once stuck for a reply. ‘Actually,’ she said at last, ‘the point is I don’t dance.’
‘Fine,’ Hugo said. ‘Then I’ll teach you. It’s very simple.’
‘I didn’t say I can’t,’ Artemis corrected him. ‘I said I don’t.’
‘It’s one and the same thing to me,’ said Hugo.
Artemis had no further time to protest before Hugo lifted her off the oak table on which she and Ellie were temporarily perched, and holding her a couple of inches off the ground with his right arm round her waist, started to dance for the both of them. After a moment, Artemis’s stiff body visibly relaxed and she looked up at Hugo, almost curiously, without smiling.
‘See?’ Hugo stopped dancing for a moment, but kept Artemis still held up, the toe of her good left foot just reaching the floor. ‘I told you there was nothing to it.’ And with that he started dancing again, and slowly disappeared with Artemis into the throng in the dining hall.
They reappeared later, when the elderly rabbit had scored what Ellie reckoned to be another thirty-four runs. Hugo had his left arm round Artemis’s waist, thus acting as her right leg. He lifted her back on to the oak table and as he did so Artemis placed a hand on either shoulder.
‘Thank you,’ she said to him.
‘That was fun,’ Hugo said.
‘Yes,’ Artemis replied. ‘It’s a really good band.’
Hugo now turned to Ellie. ‘Well?’ he said.
Ellie could have married him then, just for the look on Artemis’s face. It wasn’t a smile, it wasn’t gratitude, it was quite simply happiness.
‘Well?’ Hugo repeated, standing in front of her once again.
‘Yes,’ Ellie said. ‘I will.’
‘Sorry,’ Hugo said. ‘You will what?’
‘Come and dance,’ Ellie smiled.
She lost count of how many dances they had. All Ellie knew when it was time to go home was that when Hugo held her in his arms all the dreams she’d never had came true.
Later Ellie found it impossible to sleep. There was too much in her head. Several times she sat bolt upright and stared into the pitch darkness, as she thought about the real consequences of marriage to Hugo. She knew now that she loved him, but if he loved her and she loved him, there would be no-one for Artemis.
‘Are you asleep?’ she whispered, pushing open Artemis’s bedroom door. There was no answer. ‘Are you asleep?’ she asked again.
‘No,’ came the gruff reply. ‘Or if I was, I’m not now.’
Artemis was just a shape in the bed, turned with its face to the wall. Unable to see where she was going, Ellie collided with a chair, and Artemis’s stick clattered to the floor.
‘Can I come in?’ she whispered, halfway across the room.
‘I’d love to know what else you think you’re doing,’ Artemis replied, laughing suddenly but still not turning round.
Ellie came to the edge of her bed. ‘I couldn’t sleep, I’m sorry.’
‘Yes,’ said Artemis, pulling the covers up almost over her head. ‘I’m sorry too.’
It had started to rain heavily, down from the dark clouds which had been gathering round the moon as they drove home. There was not a bite of wind, so the water fell straight from the sky, thundering into the ground below, drumming on the grass, pounding the earth, drilling holes in the sands and soaking the turves. It fell remorselessly, leaping off the slates and missing the gutters, knocking leaves off the trees and heads from the dying flowers. As she turned to stand and watch it at the window, Ellie could imagine all nature out there running for cover, down holes and burrows, under bushes and hedgerows, as the dark landscape flooded with a river of rain.
‘I’m trying to get to sl
eep,’ Artemis complained, as Ellie just stood in silence.
‘I know,’ Ellie replied. ‘I was as well. I just couldn’t.’
There came a deep sigh from the bed, and then silence. Finally Artemis shifted her position and turned round to lie on her back. ‘Any particular reason?’ she asked. ‘Why you couldn’t sleep?’
The rain started to fall even harder, cascading off the roof.
‘I don’t know how to tell you this.’
‘What?’
‘Hugo wants to marry me.’
‘Yes?’ Artemis replied after a moment. ‘So why’s that so difficult to tell?’
‘I don’t know what to do, Artemis,’ Ellie said, turning from the window. ‘I really don’t. I just don’t know what to do.’
‘Of course you do, don’t be an idiot,’ Artemis told her, sitting up to plump her pillow. ‘You know perfectly well what to do.’ She lay down and settled back on her side with her face to the wall. ‘Marry him,’ she said. ‘That’s what to do. And be happy. Why not? He’s the nicest man anyone could meet.’
Ellie waited for a few moments longer, watching the rain bouncing off the terrace. Then she went and kissed Artemis goodnight on the top of her now submerged blonde head and tiptoed back to her bed where, within five minutes of climbing into it, she was fast asleep.
Artemis, on the other hand, didn’t finally close her eyes again until the dawn had begun to light up the sky.
10
The weather had broken. The soft sunny days of September had given away to early October rain, or mornings of heavy autumnal mist which shrouded the landscape. Even so, they all still went out walking whenever possible, in heavily oiled waterproofs bought from the village store, the girls in Aran berets and gloves, and Hugo in a fisherman’s sou’wester which looked a little out of keeping with his donnish brass-rimmed spectacles. And everywhere they went they went as a threesome, as if by tacit agreement there was still a status quo, for no direct inference had been made to the future or the likelihood of change.
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