‘It’s not right, that’s all.’
‘You’re wrong. Bleu passé is perfectly correct.’ Hugo turned his back on Artemis, who had climbed down off the window ledge by now and had made her way over to stare more closely at Hugo’s colour experiments.
‘Why did you take the paper down?’ Artemis asked.
‘I didn’t.’
‘It was eighteenth-century.’
‘I don’t actually care, Artemis, if it was pre-Christ. I didn’t like it. It was too ornate. But I didn’t take it down. It fell down.’ He turned to her, to emphasize his point with a look. Artemis merely stared back at him, raising both eyebrows.
‘Hugo,’ she said firmly, ‘you cannot paint this room.’
‘Yes I can, Artemis,’ he replied. ‘And if you stay for long enough you’ll be able to watch me.’
Artemis looked at him, steadying her gaze, staring right into his eyes. ‘I think I’ll just go for a walk,’ she said finally. ‘I thought this would be a mistake.’ She turned to go.
Hugo, suddenly and unreasonably infuriated, took hold of her by the shoulders and turned her back to him. ‘Where are you off to now, Tom?’
‘Let go of me, please, Hugo. And don’t call me that.’
‘Call you what?’
‘You know perfectly well. And let go of me.’
‘Not until you say where you’re going.’
‘Please, Hugo. Will you please let go of me.’
‘No.’
Artemis fell silent and let herself go limp and unresistant, in an attempt to embarrass him. She stared up at him, with her eyes wide open, showing nothing but disinterest. If he let her go, she would fall.
Hugo held her up by both shoulders, aware of what she was trying to do, and yet helpless himself to do anything. ‘Where were you off to, Tom?’
‘Does it matter? It’s academic, isn’t it?’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Artemis!’ Hugo felt like shaking her. ‘Stop behaving like such a spoilt brat!’
‘You’re the one behaving like a spoilt brat, Hugo,’ Artemis said. ‘Now will you please let me go.’
‘Not until you tell me where you were going!’
Artemis deliberately widened her eyes even further, as if in amazement, and then suddenly started to laugh.
‘You were going to do one of your damned disappearing acts, weren’t you?’ Hugo began to shout, unable to resist her provocation any more. ‘You were going to keep the attention on you, the only way you know how! By taking off and going! And not telling anyone where or why! You just love doing that, don’t you? Doing your vanishing act! Knowing damned well that the moment you’ve disappeared, everyone will be talking about you even more! And worrying about you even more! And wondering what they’ve done this time to hurt you! While you just take off and enjoy yourself! And do what you please! What you like! And where you like! And then you just – you just swan back into people’s lives again out of the blue! As if nothing had happened! As if you don’t give a damn and as if no-one else gives a damn for you either!’
Artemis was no longer limp in his arms. As he had berated her, her body had stiffened, and now an expression of real concern and utter astonishment replaced her look of studied indifference.
Until Hugo kissed her.
He regretted it at once, because as he held her in his arms and kissed her, he found the real Artemis. Gone, as soon as they kissed, was all that toughness and that fierce independence, to be replaced by softness and vulnerability.
‘Oh God,’ he whispered as they parted. ‘God why the hell did I do that?’
‘I can’t imagine,’ Artemis muttered.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, as she finally freed herself and began to back away. ‘You’re not going, surely?’ He ran from where he was standing, round her, intercepting her before she got to the doorway. ‘You can’t go now.’
‘Don’t be an idiot.’
‘Tom – don’t! It won’t ever happen again, I promise. And it will only make things worse if you go!’
Artemis turned away from him.
‘I shouldn’t have done it, I know, and I’m sorry,’ Hugo was saying, somewhere in the distance. ‘Please, Tom. Please forgive me. You looked – it was just – I’m sorry. I really am. I just couldn’t help it.’
She didn’t want him to be sorry. She should have done, she knew that perfectly well. She should have slapped his face and told him off. She should have been enraged, outraged and affronted. At least she should have demanded an apology and brought him to his senses by reminding him of what he had endangered by his folly. But instead all Artemis could think of was him holding her once more and kissing her. And because that was all she could think of she despised herself even more deeply than Hugo was at that moment despising himself.
‘I was going to leave for Ireland on Sunday,’ she said. ‘But I think I’d better go tomorrow instead.’
‘Don’t,’ Hugo pleaded. ‘You don’t have to go. Stay here – please. You must believe me, Artemis. I promise nothing like that will ever happen again.’
The irony, Artemis thought as she tried to ease herself past Hugo in the doorway, was that the real reason for her decision to leave was really because he was making such a promise. If he had told her to stay, because he wanted to hold her again, because he wanted to kiss her, because he wanted to make love to her, then she knew she would have found it much harder to leave than to stay. But because he was admitting it had been a mistake, something done in a moment of rashness, a brief folly, he had now made it impossible for her to remain there.
Hugo rushed after her as she made her way across the hall and towards the stairs, calling for her to wait. At the same moment Ellie came through a pass door from the kitchens.
‘Tom!’ Hugo was calling urgently. ‘Wait a minute, Tom! Please listen to me! Please!’
‘What’s the matter?’ Ellie asked him, appearing out of the shadows and startling him. ‘You two aren’t having one of your famous rows?’
‘Yes,’ said Hugo hurriedly. ‘And as a result, Artemis is about to perform one of her equally famous disappearing acts.’
‘But isn’t that just what you wanted, Hugo?’
‘Absolutely,’ Artemis agreed.
‘Look,’ said Hugo, taking a deep breath. ‘Just listen to me, both of you. I’m very sorry. I’m sorry for the way I behaved. I was behaving –’ He hesitated.
Artemis helped him out. ‘Like a spoilt brat?’
‘Well said, Artemis,’ Ellie agreed. ‘You were, too.’
‘I know,’ said Hugo. ‘And I’m sorry.’ He turned to Artemis. ‘Please forgive me, Tom. Please.’
‘Well?’ Ellie asked, looking at Artemis who was staring at Hugo. ‘Are you going to forgive him?’
‘No,’ Artemis replied.
‘No I don’t blame you,’ Ellie said. ‘I don’t think I would either.’
‘Eye-ther,’ Hugo said through clenched teeth, as if scolding a child. ‘Eye-ther.’
‘I don’t forgive you, eye-ther,’ said Ellie, mockingly. ‘I’ve never seen such spoilt behaviour. OK – so why don’t you go back to your painting, Mr Tanner? And leave me to talk Artemis out of rushing off into the blue? Go on.’
Ellie took Artemis’s arm and started leading her up the stairs. ‘You’re crazy if you think you can disappear right now,’ she said. ‘What about our party tonight?’
Artemis looked back down over the staircase bannisters just once. Hugo was still standing below, staring up at her, the paint dripping slowly from the brush he had in his hand on to the marble floor of the hall.
Later, as she dressed for the party that evening, Artemis tried to attribute her inability to leave to the depth of her affection for Ellie. But the more she stared at her reflection in the mirror, the more she knew she was deceiving herself. There was only one real reason she was staying on at Brougham, and that was to be near Hugo.
Ellie sat her next to him at dinner, opposite an astonishingly pretty gir
l called Emerald, dressed in an oyster coloured gown with a two-inch-thick choker of huge sheeny pearls at her neck, and next to a most dashing young man called Charles, with dark lanolined hair and a permanently inquisitive expression. Emerald remembered Artemis from when they were both children, as she had often been taken out for a day’s hunting when she had come to stay with relatives close by in Malmesbury. Artemis, given Emerald’s quite astounding beauty and charming personality, but most of all her proximity to Hugo, found herself absurdly relieved when she learned that Emerald had recently married. Charles Hunter, the dark-haired handsome man on Artemis’s right, was a captain in the Hussars, and the son of a general who was sitting on the left of his hostess. Charles Hunter, unlike Emerald, was as yet unmarried.
There were twenty six all told sat down to dinner, including the host and hostess, either side and at the end of a beautifully laid table, set with three superb flower arrangements and four magnificent antique five-sticked silver candelabra. The food and wines were sublime and faultlessly presented and served and the party was so obviously successful that Artemis could only wonder at how someone as socially unversed and apparently unskilled as Ellie could have organized and hosted it.
Thankfully Hugo paid more attention to the girl on his left than he did to Artemis, although he was far too much the perfect gentleman to neglect her. Even so, their conversation was kept deliberately trivial and whenever possible Hugo tried to include the girl on his left and the man on her left, and the young man on Artemis’s right. Only once was there any contact between Hugo and Artemis, when Hugo’s hand accidentally brushed her’s under the tablecloth, and Hugo blushed a deep red. And only once did they find themselves left alone while conversing. It was during pudding, when both their neighbours had simultaneously become deeply involved with both of their neighbours, leaving Artemis marooned with Hugo.
‘Tom,’ he began.
‘Aren’t the flowers lovely?’ Hugo frowned at her. Artemis continued. ‘Nanny always said when stuck for something to say, or the right thing to say,’ Artemis glanced at him, ‘simply remark on the flowers,’ she continued. ‘And aren’t they simply lovely?’
Hugo smiled, but still tried to catch Artemis’s eyes with his. He failed.
‘Tell me about the Middle East,’ Artemis said, putting her gold spoon down, her food finished, and staring upwards at the ceiling. ‘We’ve never really talked about that, have we?’ Then she eyed him. Hugo didn’t know whether she was fooling, or being serious.
‘I told you. I often went out there with my father,’ Hugo replied. ‘You remember.’
‘No I don’t.’
Deciding that Artemis was being deliberately over formal to forestall any intimacy on his part, Hugo told Artemis all over again about his experiences out east. ‘One of my father’s many interests,’ he recited, ‘was archeology.’
The tone of his voice earned Hugo a sharp kick under the table. ‘Behave yourself,’ Artemis warned.
Hugo glanced at her, and seeing the look in her eyes, started again, but telling it now as if it was the first time. ‘My father was very interested in archeology,’ he said. ‘And so I spent quite a lot of time in Egypt and North Africa, when I was at Oxford.’
‘You should never have kissed me,’ Artemis said. ‘Go on.’
Hugo swallowed and stared at her.
‘I said go on,’ Artemis repeated.
‘In the summer vacs. I think I might have taken it up quite seriously, had my father remained really interested. But while we were in North Africa he discovered an entirely different hobby. Sand.’
‘I’d have thought sand was a nuisance rather than a hobby,’ Artemis said, at which Hugo laughed. Artemis stared at him. ‘That wasn’t that funny,’ she said.
‘I know,’ Hugo agreed, looking at her. ‘It must have been the way you said it.’
‘Said what?’
‘That I shouldn’t have kissed you.’
She stared back at his stare, outstaring him. ‘I’m still waiting to hear how sand can become a hobby,’ she reminded him.
‘Not sand per se,’ Hugo replied. ‘The movement of sand. Its habits, how, why and where it shifts.’
‘That actually sounds quite interesting.’
‘It’s actually quite fascinating. So much so, I became as obsessed with it as my father was. At the end, he used to take us off into the desert, with no map, no compass, nothing, because he had learned to read the winds and the dunes, and the sand-shifts so well he could read great stretches of the desert as if they were a network of roads.’
‘Does it serve any practical use though? Besides – I don’t know – to stop one say being stranded at Frinton?’ She then looked up at him, poker-faced, catching his eye but this time Hugo didn’t laugh. ‘I’m being serious, Hugo. What possible actual use can a study of sand be?’ Artemis turned to the young man on her right. ‘Have you any idea of what possible use a study of sand could be Charles?’ she asked.
‘As a matter of fact,’ Charles replied, ‘if one’s talking about sand as in the desert, then yes, I think I have.’
Charles Hunter then went on to explain how important it was whenever wars were fought in desert regions to know how to read the prevailing conditions. ‘There are no landmarks as such, obviously,’ he explained. ‘You wake up one morning and there are dunes here.’ He placed the salt cellars in a certain way to illustrate his point. ‘By the afternoon they could all have been blown away and shifted to here.’ Again he moved the cellars. ‘East becomes west, and vice versa. An army, unversed in the ways of the desert, becomes disorientated. Yes, of course, true north is still that way, the way the compass points. But imagine being in let’s say the Scottish highlands, and the hills and the mountains start to change position around you, daily, sometimes several times daily. You are then at the mercy of your enemy, who by reading the signs knows the future shapes of the shifting landscape.’
‘My father used to be able to draw a projection of the next day’s lie of the land,’ Hugo said, ‘by studying the skies, and watching how the sand was shifting.’
‘Can you?’ the captain enquired.
‘I’m not nearly as good as he was,’ Hugo admitted, ‘but yes. At least I could. My father was a very good teacher, and by the end I think I’d got the hang of it.’
‘Then you must talk to my father,’ the captain suggested. ‘Desert warfare is his particular hobby-horse.’
When the ladies retired and the gentlemen were left alone, the talk became ever more serious and ever more about war. One or two of the older male guests considered the danger from Germany to be greatly exaggerated and seriously believed that Herr Hitler could be easily appeased. Hugo politely discounted such a possibility, despite his elders’ insistence that Hitler admired Britain, and in particular the way she ran and controlled such a mighty empire. Hitler, some of his guests insisted, only wanted the best for his nation, and while belligerence would be met with force, appeasement would be welcomed, and there would be peace in all their times.
Hugo, bored of a conversation he had heard round every table at which he had recently dined, privately gained possession of Artemis’s discarded table napkin and held it to his face. The scent was a million times more intoxicating than the aroma from his glass of Napoleon brandy.
He was interrupted from his reverie by the arrival of Charles Hunter’s father, General Hunter, who pulled a chair up alongside Hugo. ‘May I?’ he said.
‘Of course,’ said Hugo.
‘Hear you know a thing or two about sand,’ General Hunter said, sitting down. ‘And deserts.’
‘A little,’ Hugo replied.
‘Good to know,’ said the general. ‘Sometimes funny things like that come in jolly handy.’
Ellie and Hugo made love that night, as they still did almost every night and Hugo was as astonished as ever at their physical compatibility. All the same, when he first embraced his wife, and held her to him, he was deeply troubled to find that all he could really thin
k of was the sweet memory of Artemis Deverill’s pretty little mouth.
14
Ellie insisted that Artemis should live in the Dower House, an idea which met with strenuous opposition from Hugo.
‘You seem to forget we are married, Ellie!’ Hugo reminded her. ‘We’re not still all on holiday in Ireland!’
‘You mean because we’re married,’ Ellie said factually, ‘we can’t all three of us go on liking each other.’
‘We can be friends,’ Hugo argued. ‘Of course! But it has to be a different form of friendship! You and I are man and wife! And well Artemis – Artemis is –’ Hugo foundered. Ellie offered him no help, until all he could offer was just a feeble shrug of his shoulders.
‘Artemis is our friend,’ said Ellie gently. ‘And she’s lonely.’
‘Yes, Ellie! Of course she’s our friend! And I’m sure she’s lonely. But marriage changes things!’
‘I don’t see why.’
‘Well it does! Look.’ Hugo sat down on the bed beside Ellie. ‘Look – I can hardly be friends with Artemis the way I was before, now can I?’
‘Why can’t you?’
‘For a start you’d be jealous!’
‘Oh Hugo. Hugo. Don’t be such a child!’
Which was invariably how each argument would end, with Ellie provoking Hugo rather than admitting there was even the slightest possibility of him being right.
For herself, Artemis resisted accepting Ellie’s invitation to move into the empty Dower House for as long as she could, but circumstances were against her. Unsurprisingly, she had no real wish to return to Ireland, even though Cousin Rose wrote and said there was a bed permanently made up for her. She told herself that her reluctance to return was because the inexpediency of her hasty marriage might have made her look foolish in everyone’s eyes, while knowing full well the real reasons lay elsewhere.
For a start, there was the question of money. Artemis had never had even the slightest idea how to handle the money she had inherited following the sale of Brougham. It was not an enormous sum, but Artemis gave this little or no thought. Instead, whenever she needed money, she simply wrote a cheque, failing to understand that for the cheque to be honoured there had to be money in the bank. As a result, her profligacy, particularly her trip to America and her visits to Europe, had severely dented her resources, so much so that now both her trustees and the bank were writing to her, advising immediate caution.
In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 30
