In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 14

  ‘I don’t believe you never had a lesson,’ he said. ‘It just isn’t fair.’

  ‘I really should go home now, Buck,’ she replied, smiling back at his smile. ‘Don’t you think I should go home?’

  ‘After you’ve played “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”,’ Buck said. ‘I love that song, and I love the way you play it.’

  ‘So,’ Ellie agreed. ‘I’ll play it once, but then I must go home.’

  ‘No you must not,’ Buck said quietly, and Ellie fell silent, afraid for a moment lest Buck was about to try and break their agreement. ‘I’m afraid you’re not going home, Ellie, you’re not going anywhere. Not until you’ve opened this.’ He pushed the small dark-red box across the top of the piano, nearer to Ellie.

  ‘Would you like me to open it now?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘If you would,’ Buck replied. ‘Sure.’

  The box was of wood, covered in velvet, the stuff of Ellie’s dreams. Inside, the lid was lined with a dark blue satin that was almost black, the other half containing a cushion, again made of velvet, the crevice of which held a diamond ring.

  All Ellie could do was frown. She frowned at the ring as if it shouldn’t be there, then she frowned in bewilderment up at Buck for being the person who put it there, and then she frowned back at the blinky and quivery and glimmerous stone.

  ‘Put it on, Ellie,’ Buck said. ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘But what’s it for, Buck?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘It’s for you, Ellie.’

  ‘You’ve already given me an engagement ring, Buck.’

  ‘I know I have. This one’s for eternity.’

  Ellie put it on the third finger of her left hand and stared at it some more. It blinked back at her, alive with light, like a star plucked from the night sky.

  ‘Good,’ Buck smiled. ‘Now play me the song.’

  Ellie played the introduction.

  ‘And I’ll sing it,’ Buck added. ‘If you don’t mind.’

  He really must have once been a fine lyric tenor, Ellie thought again, as she listened to Buck sing. His voice was still very pure, but no longer quite so strong, but that was only noticeable towards the end of the held notes. And his pitch was still perfect, his manner of singing affectionate and wry.

  Dream awhile –

  Scheme awhile – you’re sure to find –

  Happiness – and I guess –

  All those things you’ve always pined for –

  Buck hadn’t been looking at her, he’d been standing with one hand clasped to one lapel, the other deep in a jacket pocket, facing away from her, as if singing to a roomful of people. But now at the end of the line he turned as they both paused fractionally, and looked at her with the light of love in his eyes. And Ellie couldn’t help but smile back at him, and at the sweetness of his face.

  Then they continued the song.

  Gee I like to see you looking swell, baby

  Big diamond rings that Woolworths wouldn’t sell, baby!

  Ellie laughed at Buck’s adaptation of the lyrics, while the ring on her finger flashed with light.

  And as Buck looked again at the young girl at the piano, the ache in his heart was very real.

  But till that lucky day you know full well, baby –

  But then what had been just an ache in his heart turned to a pain in his chest, an agonizing, brutal pain that shot down his left arm and up into his throat. A second later he fell to the floor, his eyes wide open, his song unfinished.

  ‘You killed him.’

  Ellie paid no attention, sitting quite still and staring ahead of her.

  ‘You killed him, you hussy. And if you didn’t, you did the very next best thing.’

  She had been on her feet the moment he fell, as he crashed against the piano, his collar grasped by both his hands. But by the time she knelt at his side it seemed the life had already gone from him.

  ‘No impropriety indeed.’

  ‘There was no impropriety, I keep telling you that.’

  ‘Impropriety or no – you’ve ruined us all.’

  Patrick Milligan sighed and poured himself some more whisky, while Ellie gritted her teeth and looked out into space.

  The doctor had thought the same. ‘The best way to go, I suppose,’ he had said, as he closed up his bag. ‘I have to say when I go, this is the way I’d want it. A night on the town with a pretty girl – no no.’ And then a telling pause. ‘It has to be the best way to go. That’ll do fine by me, any day, any night. Particularly any night.’

  ‘He was just singing, that’s all,’ Ellie had explained to him, as she tried to explain to everyone. ‘I was playing the piano for him, and he was singing. He was just singing this song!’

  ‘Which song would that be now?’ her father had asked, sarcastically. ‘“The Last Rose of Summer” maybe?’

  ‘Does it matter which song! It doesn’t matter which song! He’s dead!’

  ‘Yes he is so – and you killed him, you hussy. You couldn’t wait until you were decently married –’

  ‘What do you think you’re saying! He was just singing! Just standing there singing! He died while he was singing!’

  ‘I never heard the likes of it. I never heard of a man dying from singing.’

  ‘Well Buck did!’ Ellie cried. ‘That’s exactly how Buck died!’ She sank to the sofa and put her head in her hands.

  Her father straightened his shoulders and sniffed. ‘And as for there being no impropriety,’ he went on, ‘I should never have listened to that old goat next door. Ach, I know you were both fully dressed – but what of it! That’s not to say that earlier on in the night there’d not been any impropriety. Can you imagine what people are saying? Sure the whole town’s full of it! Did you hear tell of old Milligan’s hussy of a daughter? And that dirty old Buck O’Hara? Ah sure the whole of Boston’s talking about nothing else.’

  It had been there and now it was gone. One moment she had a future and now she was back in her past. Yesterday there had been a tomorrow, today there was just today. Buck O’Hara was dead, and gone was the hope Ellie’d had for a life. And yet –

  ‘Died on the nest, that’s what they’re saying. You know that, don’t you? They’re saying, if you’re listening, if you’re even remotely interested, that Buck O’Hara died on the nest!’

  And yet there was still a light under the door which had seemed once more to be shut tight on Ellie. They had been going to sail to Europe for their honeymoon. First-class, adjoining cabins and a private lounge.

  ‘Have you no shame?’ her father demanded, coming round to stand in front of his daughter, blocking out her daydream.

  She looked up at him, weary of his bullying, tired of his brutality. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have no shame. Why should I? The only shame I have is the shame I feel for you.’

  She knew he’d hit her, but she didn’t care. She didn’t even feel it, not the pain anyway. She was only aware of the trickle of warm blood running out from one side of her nose.

  ‘You’ve ruined us all!’ he roared. ‘You little slut! You jezebel!’

  ‘And why should you be ruined?’ Ellie calmly asked, taking a handkerchief from her purse to hold to her nose. ‘You couldn’t be ruined by Buck’s death. Not unless you were up to something.’

  ‘We weren’t up to anything, do you hear? We’d just got ourselves gainfully employed, you might say. Mighty gainfully employed. And now you’ve put your spoke in our wheels and crashed the cart all right.’

  ‘You were working for Buck?’ Ellie asked, with a sudden thought, as she remembered the parked sedan full of big men. ‘You and the “broth”?’

  ‘We were working for O’Hara, that’s right. I’d got us all a very good job. The sort of job a man can work up from. Until he makes it one hell of a good job.’

  ‘How did you do it?’ Ellie asked curiously. ‘Buck might have been a rich man but he was no soft touch.’

  ‘A rich man like him needed protecting! A man like that, with his mone
y, walking round the streets like he was anybody! He needed protecting, we gave it to him, your brothers and I.’

  ‘The only thing Buck needed protection from, Pa, was from people like you,’ Ellie replied, before she rose and walked out of the house.

  6

  ‘Your tickets and passport are in the desk, darling!’ Diana called to Artemis from her bedroom as they dressed for Artemis’s final evening in Boston. ‘Don’t forget!’

  ‘I wish I wasn’t going,’ Artemis called back, half turning to examine the back of her new gown in the mirror. ‘I’m sure it’s going to be frightfully dull after America.’

  ‘Ireland is never dull,’ her godmother announced, coming into the drawing room of their suite. ‘The one thing you are guaranteed to get going to Ireland is a good time. And the one thing you must always remember is never to believe one blind word anyone says.’

  The tickets and the passports were in the desk. Buck had showed them to her, before they had gone out for the last time, and sure enough, there they still were, stowed neatly inside the lavishly illustrated brochure for the S.S. Baltimore. Ellie took the entire package out of the drawer and slipped it into her purse.

  ‘Did you find what you were looking for, Miss Milligan?’ her late fiancé’s private secretary asked her as he escorted her from the deserted offices, just as he had escorted her into them over a year before when taking her to meet his employer for the first time.

  ‘Yes thank you, Richard,’ Ellie replied, and then hesitated. ‘But you won’t say anything about this to anyone, will you, Richard?’ She looked beseechingly at the young man, knowing that in reality her secret was safe. Richard had been quite hopelessly in love with her since their very first encounter, a fact he kept well concealed from his employer, but which he was not quite so good at hiding from Ellie.

  ‘Why!’ Madame used to laugh on the way down in the elevator, ‘It is wonderful! I nevaire see such cow eyes! He follow you round like a little dog!’

  ‘I won’t tell a soul, Miss Milligan,’ Richard replied gravely. ‘You have my word.’

  ‘If anybody does find out,’ Ellie continued, ‘they might say something to somebody else – and in no time at all it could get back to my father. And since I’m not yet twenty-one, you see . . . And he wouldn’t just stop me leaving, Richard. Believe me. He’d take his belt to me. Like he always has.’ Ellie was ashamed of what she had said, even though it was the truth. She was ashamed both of the truth and of having to use it to buy his silence.

  ‘No-one, I promise you, Miss Milligan, will ever know a thing.’

  ‘You won’t ever know what this means,’ Ellie told him as they waited for Buck’s private elevator to arrive.

  Richard cleared his throat. ‘Are you going to be away for long?’ he asked as casually as he could.

  ‘No, and yes, in a way. That is, I just want time to think, Richard, you know, sort myself out?’

  Richard smiled at her as the lift doors closed. It was the sort of smile that tried to say nothing and said everything, and looking up at him Ellie knew at once that she had been right to lie. It would be a long time until she saw him again. Or America.

  ‘Why don’t you come with me, Patsy?’ Ellie asked him in a low voice, but her brother shook his head.

  They were sitting in their local drugstore, in front of two as yet untouched milkshakes.

  ‘I’ve enough money to get us both over there. If I don’t encash Buck’s ticket –’

  ‘No, Ellie, I’ve told you. It’s out of the question.’

  ‘There really will be no problem once we get to Ireland.’

  ‘No, Ellie,’ Patsy repeated, firmly. ‘I really can’t. It’s all set. Dad and the boys are all going to be at the game that night. The Red Sox are playing the Dodgers –’

  ‘Why not?’ Ellie hissed. ‘One good reason.’

  ‘And they’ll be leaving home real early,’ Patsy continued.

  ‘I said,’ Ellie persisted, ‘I want just one good reason, and I mean why don’t you come with me? There’s nothing, Patsy, nothing, to keep you here.’

  Patsy pulled his milkshake towards him and stared at it. ‘There is. I met a girl.’

  ‘You met a girl?’ Ellie frowned.

  Patsy grinned. ‘If you really want to know, Ellie, she’s called Helen, and I met her three months ago, when I dropped you off one morning at O’Hara’s. She works there. She’s a floorwalker. And the dishiest little walker that ever trod across Mr O’Hara’s shop.’

  ‘Oh, Pat,’ Ellie sighed, ‘you’re too young to fall in love. Far, far too young.’ Nevertheless, she put an arm round his shoulders. ‘Useless to say that when a person’s in love, they’re in love.’

  ‘Yes,’ Patsy agreed, ‘but then love isn’t something that’s crossed your path yet, is it, Ellie?’

  Ellie looked at her brother’s reflection in the mirror behind the milk bar. She didn’t really mind him getting at her about poor Mr O’Hara. That was a door that was shut for ever. There was only one way to go now, and that was ahead.

  Ellie could see him far below, in the vast crowd that had come to see the liner off, waving both his hands up at her, and then taking off his hat and waving that. The sounds of the band on the quayside were momentarily completely drowned by the deep groan of the liner’s giant foghorns as the tugs started to pull the ship out to sea. Everyone on the quayside waved and cheered, or waved and cried, as the foghorns again signalled the liner’s departure.

  The band struck up once more and the crowd started singing, as the great ship moved slowly away from them.

  ‘Now is the hour, when we must say goodbye!’ the voices sang across the widening gap of dark water. ‘Soon I’ll be sailing, far across the sky!’ Ellie could still see Patsy’s hat, waving in the air as her brother tried to make his way along the packed quayside. ‘When I am gone – oh please remember me!’ The hat now became stuck fast in the crowd, and a moment later Ellie had lost it, and it became just another hat in a mass of hats and handkerchieves, streamers and scarves. ‘For I’ll be sailing, sailing, far across the sea!’

  Everywhere lights pricked and stippled the dark swirling waters below. Behind the tugs, the sea frothed yellowy-white as the tow-boats set to in earnest to heave the massive liner from its berth and set it on its journey out into the Atlantic. The quay receded from view, slipping gradually into the darkness, and with it Boston slowly vanished, and then finally the great continent of America itself, reduced from a quite visible landmass to just a glimmering of city and harbour lights, and then finally to obliteration as the country disappeared altogether into the pitch darkness of the night.

  The tugs had gone too, cast off and set back for home, their job done. The liner’s foghorns honked them a melancholy last farewell, which was answered by several sharp but now distant toots from the invisible tow-boats, and then all that was left to the departing travellers was the seeming infinity of the huge dark ocean.

  Ellie was one of the last to leave the promenade deck, her coat wrapped well round her to protect her from the wind coming off the now open sea. There was an elderly couple nearby, huddled together, their arms around each other, and Ellie could hear the sound of the woman weeping. The man put his arm more tightly round her shoulder, but still they stayed out on deck, apparently unable, so Ellie assumed, to accept the fact of their departure.

  For herself, Ellie was cold and hungry, so she left her position on the rail and went below to find the purser’s office. She had surrendered the other half of her ticket in case there might be a need for it, and the purser had gratefully accepted it, as it seemed there was a passenger anxious to change her allotted accommodation.

  ‘The other passenger is most grateful, madam,’ the purser said as he handed Ellie her promised refund. ‘It seems there was some confusion over the original booking in Union Street, and contrary to her instructions the young lady had been allocated an inside berth with no porthole.’

  ‘They say it’s going to be very rough,
young man,’ a voice said from behind Ellie. ‘Is this true?’ An imperious old woman draped in furs and weighed down with jewellery pushed her way past to address the purser.

  ‘I’m afraid the Atlantic’s never exactly a millpond this time of year, madam,’ the purser replied with a sympathetic smile.

  ‘Well kindly instruct the captain to drive slowly,’ the old woman commanded. ‘I don’t sleep as well as I used to.’

  ‘I’ll tell him to take it easy, madam,’ the purser smiled. ‘You can rely on it.’

  Having left her coat back in her suite, Ellie decided to explore a little. The S.S. Baltimore had only been built the year before, and although she was just 32,000 tons, compared with the largest British ocean going liners which had over twice her displacement, she was considered to be a marvel of grace and speed, and the epitome of luxury, resembling more a Park Lane hotel than an Atlantic liner. Ellie marvelled at the fine wood panelling in the hallways and stairwells, the huge gilt mirrors, antique furniture and the deep carpeting. Except for the rolling of the ship, and the creaking of the woodwork, Ellie thought she might as well be in her late fiancé’s office, so beautifully was the liner fitted out.

  It was then that she saw the girl with the limp. Wandering through one of the first-class lounges, where various card schools were already in progress, Ellie had suddenly found herself in the cocktail bar. Never having been into a bar alone in her entire life, Ellie hesitated, uncertain of whether to walk on through and risk someone accosting her, or turn on her heels and get out the way she came, but thus betraying her naiveté. In the moment she paused she saw the girl, sitting up at the bar in the company of two dinner-jacketed young men. She was sipping a pale looking drink from a long stemmed glass, while seemingly ignoring the banter of her two escorts.

  She didn’t notice Ellie, as she was too busy staring ahead of her into the mirrors that lined the walls behind the shelves of the bar. But Ellie knew it was her, because of the stick which was hanging on the rail beside the girl, her long ebony cane with a silver fox’s head for a handle. It was unmistakeable, as was the beautiful girl, who now that she was hatless Ellie saw to be a blonde, with, as she turned to look at Ellie, large bright blue eyes, the colour of cornflowers.