‘Hugo my darling,’ Ellie leaned over a little, far enough to kiss him softly on the mouth. ‘What do you mean – what will I do? You know what I’ll do. What else? I’ll put on my gas mask, and my tin helmet, and take up my pitchfork, and I’ll line up on the cliffs at wherever it is –’
‘Dover.’
‘Right. I’ll be right there in line on the cliff tops of Dover along with the rest of us women.’
‘It’s going to happen, Ell,’ Hugo said. ‘Forget all this rubbish in the newspapers. I can feel it in my heart. The earth’s moving. I can hear the feet marching. And the rifles being cocked. We’re going to have to fight this Fascist pig.’ He took Ellie’s hands and placed them on her stomach. Then he placed his on top of hers, and stared at their unseen child. ‘We’re going to have to fight this lunatic for him, or her. For all the hims or hers unborn everywhere. To make sure the world is still a little bit of a good and decent place to live in.’
They made love before they bathed and got dressed for the day, tender love, slow love, full of lingering kisses and caresses, and smiles and sighs. And then as Hugo lay in the bath, seeing images in his mind he had never dreamed he would see, Ellie buried her face in her pillow and wept, because she knew from the way things were now and from the way that things were going to be that Hugo was no longer just hers.
That evening a band on the wireless played ‘Falling In Love With Love’ and when it had finished, Ellie sat at the piano and played it straight off, having only heard it once.
‘I don’t know how you do that. How did you learn to do that?’ Hugo wanted to know.
‘Isn’t necessity the mother of invention?’ she replied. ‘I had to learn things when I heard them. We could never afford sheet music.’
She played the song through again and as she did, she remembered herself as a little girl, sitting in Madame’s parlour, on a round piano stool covered in dark red velvet, a stool that spun round and round in front of a rosewood upright piano, inlaid with gleaming brass and embellished with two candleholders. Madame had taught her the rudiments of music, the keys, the intervals, the harmonies, but the ability to hear and learn was born in Ellie. She wondered often as she sat and played whether or not her mother had been a pianist. Or her grandmother. Somewhere someone in her family had been musical, but now she would never find out, for her father never returned her letters.
‘Let’s ask Artemis to dinner tomorrow,’ Ellie suggested when she had stopped playing. ‘We haven’t seen her for ages.’
‘She hasn’t seen us,’ Hugo replied from behind his newspaper. ‘She has a house of her own remember? We’ve only ever been asked there once.’
‘You know Artemis,’ Ellie laughed. ‘She prefers dogs and horses to human beings. I’ll telephone her now.’ Ellie moved to the telephone as Hugo folded over the next page of The Times.
‘Charles is in London,’ he said.
‘So?’ Ellie had the phone off the hook and ready.
‘Are you going to ask her by herself?’
‘I’m going to have to, Hugo, if Charles is in London.’ Ellie tapped the bar of the receiver, to call the operator.
‘No, wait a minute, Ellie,’ Hugo said suddenly. Ellie looked back at him, her finger on the bar, killing the call. ‘Do you think this is a good idea?’
Ellie laughed, and then shook her head. ‘You’re right,’ she teased. ‘What a terrible idea, asking your best friend to dinner.’
She put through the telephone call and waited for Artemis to answer.
‘I must say she’s been very elusive of late, even for Artemis,’ said Hugo.
‘OK,’ Ellie replied. ‘So let’s find out why.’
It was a disaster. From the moment Hugo opened the front door, wearing his newly acquired gas mask, to greet an Artemis who had already had too much to drink, the evening was calamitous. Before dinner Hugo, in an absurd but gallant attempt to put Artemis at ease, drank far too much far too quickly, and was all but incoherent by the time they sat down to eat. Ellie, who wasn’t drinking at all because of her pregnancy, found herself involuntarily excluded from subsequent proceedings and had to sit and suffer in silence while Hugo drank himself from a state of incoherent intoxication to a coherent one, in which he found everything he said extremely important, and every joke he made funny. But he was talking to himself and laughing solo at his own jokes, because Artemis seemed to pay no attention to him whatsoever, nor to Ellie. But then Artemis could hardly be blamed altogether for Ellie was so dumbfounded she couldn’t think of anything to say to either of them. She was also alone in her sobriety.
From the outset, Hugo and Artemis seemed, for some unknown reason, intent on becoming drunk. Artemis offended only by her inebriation, since her conversation consisted of single words or short phrases of assent and agreement. Whatever was said to her she would answer with ‘absolutely’ or ‘why not’ or ‘well done’, or sometimes just quite simply ‘quite’. Ellie enquired and probed and questioned and pumped and queried, but Artemis just stone-walled, either shrugging if asked a direct question, or not-knowing when asked an indirect one. So Ellie finally gave up, realizing that Artemis was up to what Hugo facetiously described as one of her little pranks.
Unfortunately Hugo was far too well stewed to be able to read the writing on the wall. On to the vintage port by now, he had stopped being argumentative or jocular, and had now become sentimental. Ellie made several attempts to leave the table and to take Artemis with her, but they both ignored her, Hugo flapping a hand at her to sit back down and Artemis simply turning away from her to try and focus on Hugo.
‘Just sit down, Ellie,’ Hugo kept telling her, until Ellie gave up and sat down and stayed sitting down, ‘just sit down. Sit down and listen, because I want to tell you something. All of you. Both of you. This is something I want us all to hear. Something very important, for us all to hear, do you hear?’
‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’ Ellie asked as the port was passed from Hugo to Artemis and back to Hugo once more, and which made Artemis laugh. ‘I don’t see what’s so funny,’ she said.
‘You wouldn’t,’ Artemis replied, before draining her port.
Ellie could have slapped her. She felt like leaning over the table and shaking Artemis by the shoulders, and boxing her ears before giving her another darned good shake. Not just for being drunk, but for managing to be so drunk and still remaining so fascinating. Not a hair nor a stitch was out of place, and her lip-sticked mouth was still as pretty and as perfect as ever. Neither did she slur her words. She just became a little more carefully articulate, waiting a split second before answering, before pronouncing her answer lucidly and clearly, albeit often with an involuntary hyphenation –
‘Abs-olutely,’
‘Terr-ibly funny,’
‘Simp-ly tragic.’ Her reactions were slower, too, but still just as telling. Instead of shooting Ellie one of her usual darting glances, or suddenly raising her eyebrows and widening her bright blue eyes, she would carefully brush a flick of blonde hair away from one eye, then blink, and then look round at Ellie with a gaze deep and bland. And then she would blink once more and run her hair away from both sides of her perfectly oval face, before turning her attentions back to Hugo.
‘Isn’t anybody going to listen to what I have to say?’ Hugo asked, although neither of the two women had said a thing in the meanwhile. ‘You really have to listen, really, because I may never get the chance to say what I’m going to say to you both. The way things are, I might never get the chance to say this to either of you ever again. And so I’m going to say it now.’
Ellie’s blood ran cold. She knew what Hugo was going to say, she could see it in his eyes as he looked slowly from one to the other of them, frowning suddenly, and with his head wobbling very slightly as he tried to keep them both in focus. Ellie tried to get up but Hugo had thought about this and he grabbed hold of her wrist, as he did of Artemis.
‘Ow,’ said Artemis. ‘You idiot.’
&nbs
p; ‘Sssshhh,’ said Hugo. ‘You have both got to listen. Because. You have. You both have got both to listen. Right.’
‘Ow!’ said Artemis again, as his grip tightened on her wrist.
‘Ssshhhhh!’ Hugo hushed again. ‘You know what I’m going to say and I know what I’m going to say, and you know what I’m going to say. But it doesn’t matter. Because it hasn’t been said before, has it. Not by you. Not by me. And not by you.’ Unable to let them go, Hugo could only identify who he meant by nodding at them, a simple act which he was finding more and more difficult. ‘There’s going to be a war,’ he announced.
‘Hugo,’ said Ellie, her mouth getting rather small.
‘Sssshhhhh!’ hushed Hugo, louder and longer. ‘I know what I’m talking about. There’s going to be a war! And when and if there is – ! Well. You tell me. You tell me what’s going to happen. God. Really. You tell me. But before it happens. Before as they say – before the barroon. Baroon. Bal-loon. Before the balloon goes up, you’ve got to listen to what I have to say.’
‘Hugo –’ Ellie warned, with a little more urgency, trying to tug her arm away.
‘Carry on,’ said Artemis. ‘We’re list-ening.’
‘I love you, Ellie.’ Hugo focused on his wife, barely. He frowned at her, harder. ‘I do,’ he said, ‘God you know how I do. God I love you.’
Ellie said nothing, too mortified with embarrassment in front of the three silent servants who were standing, backs against the wall.
‘I love you, Ellie, and –’ Hugo turned his head slowly round to Artemis. ‘And I love you too, Artemis. I do. I love you too, and I love you both. I do. Both of you.’ He looked slowly from one to the other, with a look on his face which was half puzzled frown and half ridiculous grin. Both the women stared back at him, but neither was smiling.
‘That’s it,’ Hugo said, letting go of their wrists. ‘It had to be said. Someone had to say it. So that’s it. I’ve said it, and there it is. I love you. I love you both.’
Artemis lined him up at the end of her vision, just as the spitfires would soon train their sights on the Messerschmitts, and once she had his face clearly aligned she picked up a glass of wine and threw the contents right at him.
Ellie got to her feet and left the room, as did Artemis a moment later. But Ellie went straight upstairs to her room, while Artemis weaved across the hall and limped out into the night.
Hugo was left at the table, his face and hair awash with claret. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Good God.’ And then he made an attempt to rise, pushing his chair back and grabbing at the table. Porter stepped forward and caught him, just in time.
Artemis never made it home, at least not by car. She missed the bridge entirely and rolled very slowly into the edge of the lake where she sat for ten minutes wondering where she was and what had happened. Then she opened her door and fell straight out into the dark water, losing her precious silver topped cane.
‘Damn,’ she swore. ‘Bugger. Bugger, damn and bugger.’
Above her the lights shone out from Hugo and Ellie’s bedroom, but Artemis was oblivious to them and to the raised voices which floated out across the park as she searched on her hands and knees at the water’s edge for her stick, without which she knew she could never get home.
Hugo had expected, in his drunkenness, to find Ellie in bed, curled up and possibly weeping, although for the life of him, as he staggered into the bedroom, he could not imagine why. Why should Artemis have thrown her wine at him? Why should Ellie have walked out like that? All he had done was to tell them that he loved them. So what on earth could all the fuss have been about?
The door slammed shut behind him as he crossed the threshold and someone kicked him barefooted but hard on his backside, knocking him slithering and sliding across the polished wood floor. He cried out, but too late, for as he tried to pull himself up on to the bed, whoever it was kicked him again, and then started to pull his hair ferociously, so hard that his head was jerked back and he found himself staring upside down at the furious face of Ellie.
‘Ellie?’ he mumbled. ‘Ellie –’
She pulled his hair harder and his head further backwards, and shouted at him through her tears. ‘You idiot!’ she yelled. ‘You stupid, dumb idiot!’
‘What did I do?’ Hugo shouted back, his own eyes beginning to water from the pain in his scalp.
‘What did you do?’ Ellie yelled at him. ‘What do men ever do! Except open their great, dumb mouths!’
Hugo managed to get his hands to her hands, which were still holding his hair, and grab them, so that he could turn himself to her without her pulling at him any more. They remained like that for a moment, Ellie out of breath and staring furiously at him through her tears, while Hugo, his face contorted with pain and his hands clasped on top of his head, stared back up at her.
‘Please,’ he said finally. ‘Ellie – you’re hurting.’
‘This is nothing to what I was planning to do!’ came the reply. ‘Listen, Hugo. Now you listen to me. If I wasn’t pregnant –’
‘My God, Ellie!’ Hugo gasped. ‘What are you doing? You’re pregnant!’
Ellie let go at once, staring at him wild-eyed. ‘If anything happens to the baby, Hugo!’ she warned him.
‘Nothing’s going to happen to the baby, Ell, honestly, really,’ Hugo had hold of her and was steering her gently round to the bed. ‘Now just listen –’
‘You must be joking!’ Ellie retorted. ‘That’s the last time I listen to you!’ She sat down on the edge of the bed, suddenly frowning, both hands clutching her stomach.
‘Are you all right, Ell?’
‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.’ She sat still for a while, just trying to relax and breathe regularly and deeply. ‘I’m just fine,’ she said. ‘No thanks to you.’
‘Do you want me to call the doctor?’
‘I want you to go to hell!’ Ellie hissed.
Hugo tried to gather his thoughts, but although his brain was clearing, he was still too addled to remember the exact order of events, or precisely what he said. ‘What did I say?’ he asked. ‘I’m drunk. You don’t want to take any notice of anything anybody says when they’re drunk.’
‘Is that so?’
‘That is so.’ Hugo nodded. ‘That is so.’
‘So what about in vino veritas or whatever?’
‘What about it?’
‘Exactly, Hugo. What about it?’ Ellie turned to him and grabbed one of his little fingers, pulling it back.
‘Ow,’ Hugo said. ‘Ow.’
‘Are you in love with Artemis?’ Ellie demanded.
‘Did I say that?’ Hugo felt a hot blush starting somewhere under his arms and down round his feet, and spreading rapidly all over him. ‘I didn’t say. Did I say that?’
‘Answer me!’ Ellie yelled. ‘Or I’ll break your goddam pinkie!’
‘What’s a goddam pinkie?’ Hugo enquired.
‘This!’ And Ellie pulled his finger back some more.
‘Don’t do that!’ Hugo shouted. ‘That really hurts!’
‘Are you in love with Artemis!’
‘No I am not in love with Artemis! Why should I be in love with Artemis!’
‘Because – you dumb great idiot – because you said you loved her!’
‘That’s different!’
‘What’s so different?’
‘I love Artemis, but I’m not in love with her! I love her as a friend! The way you do! You love Artemis, don’t you?’
‘I did,’ Ellie said, releasing the pressure on Hugo’s finger. ‘Now I’m not so sure.’
‘Why?’ Hugo wrenched his finger away and rubbed it, his tongue stuck in his cheek like a little boy.
‘Why do you think?’ Ellie asked. ‘Because she’s in love with you.’
‘Oh don’t talk such rubbish,’ Hugo sighed. ‘You love Artemis, Artemis loves you, I love Artemis, maybe Artemis loves me –’
‘You bet she loves you.’
Hugo turne
d to Ellie, sober enough now to read her tone right. ‘I love you, Ellie,’ he said, putting his arm round her waist. ‘You know I love you. I love you and that’s what matters. There might be six or sixty or six hundred people out there – which there aren’t. But there might be. Who might be in love with me. But that doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter how many there were. What matters is who I love. And I love you. That’s what matters. I love you, and you love me.’
‘What about Artemis?’ Ellie rested her weary head on Hugo’s shoulder.
‘When I said I loved you both, if that’s what I said –’ Hugo replied.
‘That’s what you said all right,’ Ellie sighed.
‘I meant it. I do love you both. As friends. I love some of my male friends. William. I love William.’
‘You don’t go around telling William you love him.’
‘That’s different.’
‘No it isn’t.’
‘Yes it is. I love William, but that’s different.’
‘OK,’ said Ellie with a grin. ‘If you love William, you make sure you tell him next time you see him.’
Hugo looked at her and smiled back. Then he kissed her. ‘I love you,’ he said.
‘And I love you,’ she said.
‘And we both love Artemis.’
‘OK. We both love Artemis. I’m just not too sure how she feels about me right at this moment.’
Hugo suddenly put a finger to his lips and pointed to the doorway, under which was seeping a slow trickle of water. Ellie frowned, but keeping his finger to his lips Hugo got up and did his best to tiptoe in as straight a line as possible over to the door, which he then flung open.
Artemis was standing there, soaking wet from the lake. She looked at Hugo, blinked then looked past him at Ellie. ‘Hullo,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ said Ellie.
‘How long have you been out there?’ Hugo asked.
Artemis shrugged. ‘Long enough,’ she said.
‘What’s the problem?’
Artemis shrugged again. ‘Life,’ she said. ‘I suppose.’
In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 35
