‘I think I should tell you, Tom,’ he said, still resting his chin on the scaffolding. ‘If you go to London, Tom, I shall kill myself.’
‘That’s your business, Hugo,’ Artemis said, doing her best to sound matter-of-fact. ‘What you do with your life is entirely your affair.’
Artemis stayed on at Brougham for the whole month of March, trying to persuade herself that it was nothing to do with the threat of suicide, but knowing the truth to be different.
And so remain she did, although to avoid further complications, she saw as little of Hugo as possible, keeping away from him in the house, and avoiding any chance of meeting him when he was in the grounds. After a couple of weeks, Ellie told her that Hugo hardly ever mentioned her name, or even asked for her. Artemis felt encouraged, hoping that although she hadn’t had the courage to walk out and go back to London, nonetheless a version of her plan had worked.
And so did Ellie, until her butler dashed her hopes.
‘Apparently Hugo’s been asking Porter,’ Ellie told Artemis on her next visit. ‘First thing in the morning he finds him and asks whether or not you’re still here, and as soon as he finds that you are, he never mentions you again all day. I never thought of warning Porter.’
Inevitably the mural had caused a scandal. The nursing staff and also all the patients could talk of nothing else.
‘That was all you needed,’ Artemis said one day as they walked past the painting. ‘Can you imagine.’
‘It’s not what I can imagine,’ Ellie said with a sigh, nodding towards the nurses and their charges. ‘It’s what that lot can.’
‘Patsy’s arriving in a couple of days,’ Artemis said, again switching. ‘But you probably know that.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ Ellie smiled. ‘The thought of it’s keeping me together. To be on the safe side, I think it would be better if Patsy stayed with you, at the Dower House. I can come and visit.’
‘He’s going to be awfully disappointed,’ was all Artemis could think of by way of a reply. ‘He was so looking forward to seeing the house.’
‘There’ll be all the time in the world after the war,’ Ellie said, suddenly sounding very weary. ‘I’m sure Brougham will still be here.’
‘Yes of course,’ Artemis agreed, doing her best to forget there were any such things in a war as casualties.
That evening, late, the telephone rang in the Dower House. It was Patsy. He could hardly speak.
‘What is it?’ Artemis asked. ‘Are you unwell?’
‘I can’t make it, honey. They’ve cut our leave.’
‘What, you mean you have no leave at all?’
‘Not as from seventeen hundred hours tomorrow. Which means I’d never make it. Not down to Wilshire and back.’
‘Wiltshire,’ Artemis said vaguely. ‘Not Wilshire.’ She thought for a moment, and then decided. ‘I’ll have to come up to you then. Let me see, when’s the first train up to London?’ She stopped to consult the amended and re-amended railway timetable which was always left by the phone.
‘You can’t drive up?’
‘We have petrol rationing, remember?’ Artemis replied. ‘Anyway, we’ve laid all the cars up. Even the vet comes by horseback.’ She ran her finger along the times of the early trains.
‘You have no transport down there at all?’
‘Only the ambulances. And the pony and trap. And much as I love you –’
‘As long as you still love me.’
‘Afraid so. Even more than ever.’ She left a small pause. ‘Do you mind?’
‘I think I can live with it,’ Patsy replied, and Artemis could almost hear his grin.
‘There’s a train that leaves at nine o’clock, which is the only one which goes all the way through. It gets into Paddington just before twelve, with a bit of luck, and the way the trains are at the moment, we’re going to need plenty of that –’
‘That’ll give us over four hours. That’s better than nothing.’
Artemis instructed him to go and stay at the flat, which was once again fully operational, told him where the key was, where to find anything he might need, and that she would join him there as soon as possible. ‘You’re the light in my life,’ she said finally.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘So will you marry me?’
‘Not tomorrow,’ Artemis replied. ‘It would waste too much precious time.’
Hugo was in the ‘sulking’ room when Artemis rang. Ellie had been taking him through some more family memorabilia to try yet again to make the pieces fit the puzzle, but Hugo had got wise to these question and answer routines, and had devised ways to avoid directly answering questions he did not like.
‘Hullo?’ Ellie said, picking up the telephone. ‘Oh, hi there, Artemis.’ She dropped her voice and glanced across at Hugo, who was pretending to take no notice, before continuing. ‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and take this in my office.’
She got up, replacing the receiver, and went to the door. ‘Will you be all right for a minute?’ she asked Hugo. ‘I just have to find some papers.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me, Elsie.’
As soon as she was gone, Hugo quietly picked up the receiver and listened. Finally he heard a click as Ellie picked up the receiver in her office, and he covered the receiver with his hand.
It was quickly arranged. Ellie would drive Artemis to the station at a quarter past eight in the morning, picking her up from her house in one of the smaller ambulances. And because at some time of day someone was going to have to put some blood samples on a train to Bristol, it was a journey that could be justified if anyone asked.
Artemis was up and dressed and ready at half past seven. It was a cold dark windy March morning, and by the time the clock struck the hour, it had started to pour with rain. Quarter of an hour later, on the dot, the ambulance, with Ellie at the wheel, pulled up outside her front door and hooted. Artemis hugged her dog goodbye, reminded Rosie that the vet was calling in the afternoon, and hurried out through the wind and rain to the waiting vehicle. As Ellie leaned over to open the passenger door for her, Artemis heard her telephone ring.
‘Who on earth?’ she wondered, pausing for a second.
‘Do you want to go and find out?’ Ellie asked. ‘You’ve time.’
‘No.’ Artemis decided. ‘Rosie’s there, and what the eye doesn’t see and all that.’ She sat on the passenger seat and swung her legs in.
They were just about to drive off when Rosie appeared at the front door and called to them to stop.
‘What is it?’ Artemis asked.
‘It’s Mrs Tanner!’ Rosie told her, arriving breathlessly at Artemis’s open window, her face and hair dripping with rain. ‘You’re wanted up at the house, Mrs Tanner! Urgent!’
‘Where is he?’ Ellie asked as she jumped out of the car.
The nurse pointed round to the side of the house. ‘He’s on the top of the church tower!’ she said. ‘He left this note on his pillow!’ The nurse flapped a piece of paper at Ellie, which she grabbed before getting back into the ambulance to drive round to the side of the house.
‘Are you sure there’s no way anyone can get up to him?’ Artemis asked as the whole of the church came into view.
‘You heard Rosie,’ Ellie replied, tight-lipped. ‘He’s locked all the doors behind him. What does the note say?’ She handed it to Artemis who did her best to read it in the speeding vehicle.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘as far as I can make out if I go to London, he throws himself off the tower.’
Ellie glanced round at Artemis. ‘How in hell did he know you were going to London?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t a clue,’ Artemis replied. ‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’
Hugo was standing on the parapet of the tower, holding on to one of the stone carvings which sprung up in each corner. Ellie threw open the ambulance door.
‘Look,’ she said without thinking. ‘You drive yourself to the station, or you’ll
miss your train.’
‘Don’t be such an idiot,’ Artemis replied. ‘How can I?’
Ellie was out of the car and looking up at the figure high above her. ‘Hugo!’ she called. ‘Hugo – can you hear me!’
Hugo swayed, leaning over dangerously far, with only one hand holding on to the pillar. He needed the other to cup to his mouth. ‘Has Tom gone?’ he shouted down slowly and clearly. ‘Has Tom gone?’
Artemis pulled herself slowly out of the ambulance and walked round to the front. She looked up at Hugo, one hand sunk deep in her coat pocket, the other on her stick. ‘You go!’ he shouted down, slowly and clearly. ‘And I go too!’
‘The bastard,’ Artemis said, half to herself as she sat back wearily on the bonnet of the vehicle. ‘The rotten, stupid bastard.’
‘Rotten, sure,’ said Ellie, pulling her coat collar up against the driving rain. ‘But stupid, no.’
They both stood staring up at the figure above them. After a moment he called down to them once more. ‘I mean it, Tom!’ he shouted. ‘You go, and so do I!’
After a long silence, Ellie turned her back on the church and put her hands on Artemis’s shoulders. ‘Go on,’ she said, almost in a whisper. ‘Get in the van and go.’
‘You’re mad,’ Artemis said. ‘I can’t possibly.’
‘He won’t jump. Believe me.’
‘I don’t imagine he will,’ Artemis agreed. ‘But just suppose he did.’ The two women looked at each other and then Ellie gathered Artemis to her.
Hugo shouted down at them as they embraced. ‘You’re not saying goodbye, are you, Tom?’ he yelled. ‘Because if you are, say goodbye to me!’
The last word sounded like a scream, and letting go of each other Ellie and Artemis turned to stare at the tower. Hugo had let go and was standing on the edge of the tower, his hands stretched out either side of him.
‘Sweet Jesus,’ Ellie whispered. ‘I think he would jump.’
Artemis cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled at the top of her voice. ‘Get back, Hugo!’ she shouted. ‘Get down! I’m not going anywhere! I promise!’
After a moment, which seemed like an hour, Hugo grabbed hold once more of the stone pillar, and then a moment later stepped off the edge down behind the parapet, where he stayed, staring down at them.
‘OK, Hugo!’ Ellie shouted. ‘You heard Artemis! She’s not going – so you can come down now!’
‘No!’ Hugo yelled back. ‘I’m staying up here until the last train has gone!’
Artemis and Ellie sat in the ambulance out of the rain, and Artemis looked at her watch. The train would have left ten minutes ago. Without her. And Patsy would be waiting. She asked one of the nurses to go and call the flat, but after ten minutes the nurse returned with bad news.
‘We can’t get through to your flat, Lady Artemis,’ she said. ‘The operator has just told us all the lines are down as far as Swindon.’
Ellie put her arm round Artemis’s shoulder, but Artemis said nothing. She just leaned her head on her friend’s shoulder and folded her arms tightly across her chest.
Artemis went straight into the kitchen to find Rosie the moment Ellie got her home, and asked if there were any telephone calls.
‘How can there be?’ Ellie asked from behind her. ‘You heard. The lines are all down.’
‘I thought they might perhaps have been mended by now,’ Artemis replied, sitting suddenly down at the kitchen table. ‘No I don’t. I don’t know what I thought.’
Ellie asked Rosie to make them some strong coffee, and sat down opposite Artemis, but said nothing. They had said all they had to say in the ambulance.
‘How am I going to get hold of him?’ Artemis finally asked, looking up into the bulb of the light above her to stop herself crying. ‘I don’t have a clue where he is.’
‘He knows where you are,’ Ellie said. ‘And where I am. He’ll get in touch here.’
‘How? When we have no telephone?’ She put her head on her arms which she had folded in front of her on the table.
‘Sweetheart,’ Ellie said. ‘Patsy will understand. Heavens above, there’s a war on!’
‘I know,’ said Artemis, suddenly staring Ellie in the face. ‘That’s exactly what I was thinking.’ Then she got up and went upstairs to shut herself in her bedroom.
Late the next day a telegram arrived for Artemis from Patsy, in which he gave her a number and address at which she could contact him. Artemis drove herself to the village in the dog-cart, hoping perhaps to find an operable telephone somewhere, but the lines were still down, the result, it seemed, of a heavy bombing raid on a munitions factory in the Swindon area, which had put the main telephone exchange out of order. Naturally Artemis assumed she could send a wire, since she had received one herself that very morning, and then listened with a sinking heart as the postmistress told her the roundabout route it would have to take to get there.
‘It is rather urgent.’
‘And there is a war on, you know,’ came the inevitable reply.
It was difficult to find the right words. Finally she settled for ‘Delayed unavoidably due to accident at Brougham. Am unharmed. Love you with all my heart.’ To her embarrassment the postmistress read it back to her, and to the whole village shop.
On her way home, the vet caught up with her, and walked alongside the dog-cart, mounted as he was on his big grey cob. ‘I’m sorry I missed you yesterday. I gather there was a bit of a drama.’
‘It was nothing much,’ Artemis replied. ‘Just one of the patients misbehaving.’
‘Your dog,’ the vet said, coming straight to the point as he usually did. ‘How old is he now?’
Artemis told him she was not too sure because he was full grown when he first had arrived in her life. ‘He must be about ten.’
‘Yes, I should think he’s all of that,’ Mr McCabe said. ‘And more.’
They walked on in silence for a while, to just the sound of the horses’ hooves on the road and the occasional slap of the reins down the pony’s flanks.
‘I’d like another look at him.’ The vet had somehow still managed to get his pipe lit even though he was on horseback. ‘I think it could be his heart.’
‘I thought it was his leg that was wrong,’ Artemis answered in some surprise. ‘He’s been dragging it.’
‘That can sometimes be a symptom,’ Mr McCabe told her. ‘Let’s give him a day or so, to see how things are. I’ll look in some time at the end of the week.’ He raised his cap to Artemis and turned his horse away, kicking it on, as together they trotted off to visit their next patient.
Artemis kept the pony to a walk as she thought over what the vet had told her, then with a slap of the reins, urged the pony on homewards.
Ellie was receiving the news she’d been dreading.
‘You know what I’m going to say to you, Mrs Tanner,’ Mr Peake told her. ‘And you know that if it was just my decision alone –’ He tapped his pencil on the desk and sighed.
‘He’ll never get better in an asylum, Mr Peake.’
‘He might.’
‘No chance.’ Ellie shook her head. ‘Not if we go along with your theory, that all it needs is something familiar to jolt his memory back to normal.’
‘Agreed. But like I said, if it was my decision –’ The consultant left the sentence unfinished, as they both knew the matter was now out of his hands. Beds were needed for wounded military personnel, regardless of the fact that the man the authorities wished moved to a mental institution was the legal owner of the requisitioned house.
‘I know,’ Ellie interrupted. ‘You’ve been so kind. And so helpful.’
Peake tapped his pencil on his desk half a dozen or so times, before getting to his feet, and coming to stand by Ellie, who was at a window, gazing out across the park. ‘If only it hadn’t looked like attempted suicide,’ he said. ‘I managed to brush the attack on Lady Artemis under the carpet, but unfortunately everyone seems to know about the incident on the tower. It just couldn’t g
o unreported.’
Out on the lake, Ellie could see two people boating. She was wearing a long pale yellow summer dress, and Hugo was all in white, white aertex shirt, his old cricket bags, and his old school cricketing cap which he loved to wear in the summer. It was a memory from that long hot August, the month before the war had broken out. Cook had packed them a picnic lunch, which Ellie and Hugo had eaten at their leisure on the banks of the island, with their feet dangling in the cool waters, their beautiful house and home reflected in them.
‘If you do have to move him,’ Ellie began,
‘It won’t be for a week or so,’ Peake replied. ‘If we do have to move him, I want to make sure we send him to the best place.’
‘Is there such a thing?’
‘There are a few quite well-run small nursing homes.’
‘I see.’ Ellie held on to hope, pushing the image of her beloved Hugo shut away in a mental home out of her mind. ‘And in the meantime?’
‘In the meantime we just keep a close eye on him. I don’t think we need to lock him up,’ the doctor replied. ‘Only at night.’
As soon as the telephone lines were back up, Artemis put a call through to the number she assumed to be the air base, and asked for the officers’ mess.
‘This is the mess, ma’am,’ an American voice informed her. ‘How can I be of help?’
‘I’d like to speak to Lieutenant Milligan, please,’ Artemis said. ‘If that’s possible.’
‘It sure will be, ma’am, if the lieutenant is here,’ the voice replied. ‘Please just hold the line for one moment.’
Artemis waited, for more than one moment. It seemed an age before she heard the voice again on the other end of the line. ‘I’m afraid you’re out of luck, ma’am,’ the duty officer told her. ‘Lieutenant Milligan is airborne right now, but I’ll certainly make sure he gets any message. Who shall I say called?’
Having left her name and a brief message, Artemis replaced the receiver, and sat down by the fire with the last of her precious whisky to await what she hoped and prayed was Patsy’s safe return. It was still daylight, and even if his squadron had only just taken off, Artemis guessed that at the very latest he should be back around about midnight.
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