Patsy arrived two hours later. Ellie had called him constantly from the hospital, but he was out of town on a shoot and no-one seemed to be able to say when he’d be back.
‘I’ve only just got your message. What happened?’ Patsy listened intently as Ellie tried to explain. ‘You couldn’t be in better hands,’ he told her walking her down the corridor. ‘Doctor Vincent’s a number one guy. Does a lot of work for the studio. I mean it, Ellie, he’s OK. I know Jamie is going to be OK. Now wait there.’ He sat her on a chair and disappeared.
Three quarters of an hour later he was back. ‘It’s all done,’ he said. ‘I’ve fixed you a room here right next door to the baby.’
He was leading her back along the corridor now and into a big cool room, with a freshly made-up bed, and lowered blinds. All Ellie’s bags were lined up against one wall, and there was a vase of flowers on the bedside table.
‘You did all this?’ Ellie wondered, as she sat suddenly exhausted on the side of the bed.
‘M-G-M did,’ said Patsy with a wink. ‘You’re talking to a guy with friends in high places. Now at least take your shoes off and lie down. Because if anybody needs you, you’ll be right here.’
‘What about Nanny?’ Ellie asked, slipping off her shoes.
‘She’s back at the hotel,’ Patsy replied.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Ellie said. ‘However did you manage that?’
‘How do you think?’ Patsy grinned, putting his fists up. ‘I gave her the old one-two.’
Someone woke her and when they did, Ellie sat up with a start, wondering for a moment where she was. She remembered when she saw Patsy.
‘It’s all right, Mrs Tanner,’ he said. ‘It’s OK. Your baby’s fine. He had to put up a bit of a fight they tell me. But he did it. He’s gone the distance.’
‘I can’t get over!’ Hugo shouted down the phone. ‘The most leave they’ll grant me is forty-eight hours!’
‘They can’t do that to you!’ Ellie shouted back. ‘You’re a civilian!’
‘Not really!’ Hugo replied. ‘Only technically.’
It had taken the best part of two days to locate Hugo. Ellie had cabled both Brougham and his club to no avail. In the end she’d cabled Artemis at Diana Lanchester’s in Bayswater requesting Artemis to ring the emergency number Hugo had given her in order to get Hugo, if he was in England, to ring her at the hospital. When he first made contact and learned the news, Hugo’d expressed his determination to get over to America come what may, but now on his second transatlantic call he’d been forced to admit defeat.
From the start of their conversations Ellie had told him it was unnecessary, Jamie was completely out of danger, and that she’d only had to get in touch to tell him they were going to have to change their travel plans, since they wouldn’t be able to sail on the intended date.
‘Patsy thinks he’s found some alternatives!’ Ellie yelled down the crackling line. ‘There’s something sailing from San Diego through the Panama Canal to Jamaica on the seventeenth and then on to Portugal arriving on the twenty-second! Or there’s a ship from New Orleans sailing on the eighteenth to the Bermudas and then direct to Portsmouth docking Christmas Eve! Either way we’ll be home by Christmas Day!’
‘You’d better be!’ Hugo shouted back. ‘Or I’ll give up believing in Father Christmas!’
Two days later, on the morning of the 13th December, as Ellie sat in her hospital room bottle-feeding her son with glucose and water, the baby started to convulse once more, and an hour later lay in an oxygen tent with a temperature well over a hundred and three.
This time Ellie telephoned Artemis direct. ‘He’s out of danger again!’ she said, pitching her voice over the hissing and crackles on the line, ‘but Doctor Vincent thinks this can’t just be any ordinary enteritis!’
‘I don’t know anything about this sort of thing!’ Artemis shouted back. ‘I mean what does he mean by that? Does he mean it’s an extraordinary whatever? Or that it’s something else entirely?’
Ellie did her best to explain but the transatlantic connection was at its worst and Artemis could only hear every other word. What she did gather was that Ellie had been advised not even to think about leaving Los Angeles until the hospital had discovered exactly what was wrong with the baby.
Artemis left a message for Hugo at the emergency number and two hours later he arrived on the doorstep of the Bayswater flat.
‘Ellie said you’re not to go,’ Artemis informed him as she poured him a whisky.
‘I couldn’t even if I wanted to, Tom,’ Hugo said glumly. ‘I’m off abroad again.’
‘The Middle East?’ Artemis sat herself down by the fire.
‘Can I see how you write the number seven please, your ladyship?’ Hugo said in his best official voice.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Didn’t you know?’ Hugo smiled as he sat down opposite Artemis. ‘That’s how you’re meant to be able to recognize the German spies amongst us. By the way they cross their sevens.’
‘Well wherever it is you’re going,’ Artemis said, ‘will you be back for Christmas?’
‘That all depends,’ Hugo replied, ‘when I go and if I go to wherever it is they may be sending me. I’ll give you a clue, Mata Hari,’ he said. ‘It’s somewhere in the Baltic beginning with N.’
‘I didn’t think Norway was famous for sand,’ Artemis frowned.
‘For sand read snow,’ Hugo said. ‘Norway has snow the way Egypt has sand. And snow also has a habit of blowing in storms.’
While Hugo spent four freezing days in northern Norway, trying to chart the climactic idiosyncracies of the country for the benefit of the Allied Command, Doctor Vincent of the Vernon Clinic in Los Angeles was running a series of exhaustive tests on his son, in order to try to diagnose the exact cause of the infant’s intestinal upsets. Jamie had recovered quickly enough from the last attack, and seemed back to strength, but Doctor Vincent preferred to err on the side of caution and advised against any thought of travel.
‘Particularly a long sea journey, Mrs Tanner,’ she said. ‘Imagine two days out and the baby gets an attack like the first one.’ He shook his head. ‘I think we do two things. First, we have to wait and see if he suffers another attack, particularly once he’s back in his normal routine. Second, I think we have to try and isolate the cause. Because I don’t believe this is just an ordinary gastro-enteritis. I think either we have an allergy here, or a digestive weakness.’
Later Ellie cabled Hugo with the news that they wouldn’t be back for Christmas.
Hugo received the cable midday on Christmas Eve, three hours after he’d arrived back by air from Oslo. He called the clinic, but by the time he’d been connected Ellie had left with her brother to spend Christmas at his house. The nurse to whom he spoke said his son was quite better, and there was no cause for concern, but that he would be returning to the clinic after the holiday for further tests. Hugo then telephoned Artemis on her Bayswater number but there was no reply, so having called Porter to let him know he was on his way, he picked his unpacked luggage back up, packed it into his Alvis, and drove straight down to Brougham.
It was strange to enter the gates of the park and come upon an unlit house. One of the great joys of coming home to Brougham at night had been rounding that final corner of the drive to be greeted by the lights from the house. But now the place lay in total darkness, by government orders, its fine long windows shuttered, the lanterns on the gateposts and by the doorways unlit. Hugo, on sidelights only, as he’d been all the way down from London, turned the car in through the ornamental gates and sounded the horn. Within moments figures emerged from the deep shadows of the house, from under the basement arches and out from the servants’ quarters, first Porter calling out to identify his master, then Cook and Dibbs the handyman, and finally Jenkins all the way from the stableyard round the back.
Hugo dumped all his cases on the gravel and leaning back into the car suddenly switched on the headli
ghts, blinding the party who had come to greet him and making them scuttle like moles back into the dark of the house.
‘You mustn’t do that, sir!’ Porter called. ‘We’ve had the special constable up here twice already!’
‘Young Sally Topliffe from the village,’ Cook told Hugo as they all stumbled into the house carrying various items of luggage, ‘she’s a very absent minded lass. And she put her bedroom light on before pulling her black-out curtains. Well before you could say knife Sergeant Ruggins was through the door and up her stairs, two at a time, and into her bedroom to turn off her light without as much as a thank you.’
‘They fined ’er too,’ Dibbs added. ‘That Mrs Conville on the bench. Fined ’er five bob. Young Sally said it made ’er feel like a spy so it did. That’s what she said.’
‘It wasn’t much fun driving down from town, I must say,’ Hugo remarked, following the beam of Porter’s torch. ‘Someone’s cattle had got on the road outside Calne. Some chap coming the other way had run right into them.’
Cook had prepared a tray of sandwiches and a flask of hot soup for her employer, which was ready and waiting in the ‘sulking’ room, as was a welcoming fire. The night was bitterly cold and Hugo welcomed the warmth. Porter fussed round making sure the curtains and blinds were tightly pulled, while Hugo fetched a bottle of whisky from the cupboard and ordered Porter to pour them all a festive tot.
As they were drinking and gossiping, the telephone rang. Porter nodded to the party to drink up and they did, leaving Hugo alone to take the call.
‘Yes?’ said Hugo.
‘I thought it might be you,’ Artemis’s voice said in his ear. ‘I heard a car go by.’
‘When did you get down?’
‘A couple of hours ago,’ Artemis replied. ‘I’d have been down earlier but thanks to the black-out it took me over an hour to find where I’d parked the stupid car.’
‘Come to lunch tomorrow.’
‘I can’t,’ Artemis replied after a moment.
‘What – have you got people?’
‘No.’
‘Then come to lunch.’
‘Have you got people?’
‘Good lord no!’ Hugo laughed.
‘Then I can’t very well come to lunch,’ Artemis sighed in reply. ‘Can I?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘You’re the one who’s being “silly”.’
‘It’s Christmas Day! You can’t just sit over there all by yourself in your house, while I sit over here all by myself in my house! That really is silly.’
‘What would Ellie say?’ Artemis asked after a silence.
‘She’d say you were being silly.’
‘I wonder.’
‘Of course she would, Tom!’
There was another silence, during which Hugo heard Artemis breathe in and out once, very slowly. ‘I’ll come for drinks,’ she said. ‘After Matins.’
‘And you’ll stay for lunch,’ Hugo insisted, ‘after that.’
As Hugo was replacing the telephone receiver and draining his whisky glass preparatory to going to bed, Ellie was seeing her brother Patsy off on his way to the studio’s Christmas Eve party. He’d tried his best to persuade Ellie to go along with him, but even though her baby’s health was apparently back to normal and Doctor Vincent had exhorted her to go and enjoy her Christmas, Ellie was not in the mood for revelry.
‘They’ll all be there,’ Patsy said as one last throw, before climbing into his car. ‘Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, Robert Taylor, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland and Paulette Goddard –’
‘We’ve already had the roll call of stars,’ Ellie laughed, shutting him in the car. ‘Twice.’
Patsy poked his head back out through the window. ‘Practically the entire cast of Gone With The Wind!’ he said.
‘I’ll wait to see it in the cinema,’ Ellie replied, pinching his cheek. ‘Go on. Hurry up or you’ll miss all the fun.’
Ellie had moved out of the hotel and into Patsy’s house along with Nanny. It was a nice house, sizeable and bright, on a tree-lined drive in the best part of an otherwise ugly and sprawling town. But the climate was wonderful, with every day long, warm and sunny, even at this time of year, and though Ellie longed with all her heart to be home with Hugo, she knew that Jamie stood a far better chance of recovering completely in the sunshine of LA than he would back home in England, which from all reports was in the grip of the coldest winter within living memory.
More importantly, the medical care was of the highest standard, and as far as paediatric medicine went, well in advance of anything England could offer. Doctor Vincent had gone home to celebrate Christmas with his family, but had assured Ellie that if he was needed he could be back at the clinic at the very most within half an hour.
On Christmas Morning Ellie broke her vow and went to Mass for the first time since her childhood to pray for James Michael. She lit fifty candles in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary before going on to visit the baby in the clinic, where she was told his condition was still stable and that he was continuing to put back on all the weight he’d lost during the previous attacks. The nurse in charge was delighted with the baby’s continued progress, and after an hour Ellie kissed Jamie goodbye and left the clinic to have Christmas lunch with her brother.
Artemis had been happy to stay on at Brougham after Matins once she’d been told what the plan was, namely to have lunch in the friendly warmth of the kitchens with the staff. Even she could see no real objection to that, so she and Brutus sat down one end of the scrubbed wooden table with Cook at the head and Jenks on her right, while Hugo sat down the other end with Porter at the head and Mrs Byrne the housekeeper on his right. The rest of the party was made up of Mabel the only remaining parlour maid, Dibbs and his wife, the head gardener Bryant and his wife, and Toby Green, a young estate worker who’d failed his army medical due to chronic asthma.
As yet there was no food rationing, because although ration books had been issued in October, a campaign, led in the main by the Daily Express, had been successful and brought about a postponement of rationing in November. So they feasted well and merrily, warmed by the food and the wines and the roaring log fire. For those two hours there was no war, nor much talk of it, although it couldn’t be left entirely out of the conversation.
‘Did you know?’ Hugo asked at one point, as the snow started to fall again, ‘they’re even censoring the weather?’
Everyone laughed but Hugo held up his hand, insisting it was true. ‘I promise you,’ he said. ‘The Ministry of Information have officially banned the Press from passing comment on the weather.’
‘Makes you laugh, don’t it?’ Cook said. ‘We can see the poor bloomin’ birds freezing to the trees, but we can’t read all about it.’
‘According to my newspaper,’ Porter announced gravely, ‘the Ministry of Information is being run by Fred Karno’s Army.’
‘I ’eard it was the Crazy Gang myself,’ Cook replied.
‘Stinker Murdoch, on the radio the other day,’ Toby Green chipped in, ‘’e said a woman ’ad called into the Ministry of Information to ask the way to Clapham. And they said they didn’t know. And that even if they did, they couldn’t tell ’er!’ Everyone roared with laughter at what was fast becoming a national joke.
‘The Ministry of Malformation,’ Porter declared.
‘The Ministry of Muddle more like,’ Mrs Byrne sniffed.
‘Don’t worry,’ Porter said, replacing his glass on the table. ‘We shall win this war in spite of the government.’
After lunch everyone sat round the kitchen wireless and listened to the King’s Christmas broadcast: ‘“I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year,”’ the King read to the nation, ‘“give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”’
Later, as the two of them sat
on the floor in front of the fire in the small sitting room, Hugo raised his glass of port. ‘To Ellie,’ he said. ‘To Ellie. And Jamie.’
‘Here here,’ Artemis replied.
Later, when the fire began to die, Hugo went to fetch some more logs rather than ring for Porter, who according to Hugo would most probably be flat out under the table.
When he was gone, the telephone rang. Artemis, who was day-dreaming, picked up the receiver and answered the call. ‘Hullo?’
‘Hi,’ came a crackly voice after a delay. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Ellie?’
‘Who’s that?’ the voice enquired. ‘I can hardly hear you!’
‘It’s me!’ Artemis shouted. ‘Artemis!’
There was another delay, but a considerably longer one than just the time it took for a voice to cross the ocean. ‘Really?’ Ellie replied at last. ‘Well hi, Artemis! Happy Christmas!’
‘Thanks!’ Artemis called. ‘Same to you!’
Hugo struggled back in with the full log basket and Artemis held the phone up to him from the floor. ‘It’s Ellie!’ From his look Artemis knew immediately that Hugo was regretting she’d picked up the telephone. ‘Come on, dog,’ she said, pulling herself to her feet.
‘Walks.’
Brutus raised his great brown head from the floor and then reluctantly left the warmth of the fire to follow his mistress out. Artemis took the torch from by the door and carefully made her way through the dark and empty dust-sheeted rooms while her dog ran before her, quite happy in the winter darkness. Finally she found a side door which she opened to let Brutus out. It was pitch dark, and the cold took her breath away, prompting her to pull her jacket round her tightly as Brutus, remembering what fun snow was, began to gambol, a puppy once more across the whitened lawns, barking with sheer joy as he leaped in and out of the huge drifts.
Closing the door against the biting wind Artemis waited for him gazing out through a window at a landscape lit only by the gleam of the snow, and thought how strange it was, to be standing where she was, alone in her old family home, alone with the man who owned it, her best friend’s husband. If events in Ireland had been different she could now be returning from snow-covered gardens that again belonged to her, through her house, their house, through these their rooms, back to their fireside once more to sit down beside her husband.
In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 43
