In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 16

  ‘Of course we have to eat it, you idiot,’ Artemis replied. ‘That’s the whole point. No laughing and no leaving. Otherwise you lose.’

  ‘OK,’ Ellie sighed. ‘So I lose.’

  ‘Five pounds,’ Artemis said, narrowing her bright blue eyes.

  ‘We don’t have a bet.’

  ‘We do now,’ Artemis corrected her. ‘Five pounds. Which is what? About fifteen dollars.’

  Afterwards, Ellie knew she would never have got through the meal had there been nothing to lose. To Ellie, every cent counted, for not knowing where her future might lie she had decided that frugality was the best and only course. She had enough cash to keep her going, until she found employment in Ireland, from the rebate on Buck’s first-class ticket and from her small savings, and the collateral in the shape of the jewellery Buck had so generously bestowed on her, amounting to her engagement ring, her pearl necklace, two brooches, some earrings, and, of course, her diamond eternity ring.

  But fifteen dollars was fifteen dollars cash, and Ellie could not afford to lose it. So even though each successive mouthful made her feel increasingly nauseous, she ate on. And drank on, wine on top of cognac, sherry on top of wine, and finally yet another Dry Martini on top of it all. And to make it that bit more difficult, the liner had once again run into rough waters, the sea having changed from the gentle swell it had been when they had been ordering, to what Artemis liked to call choppy by the time they were halfway through their main courses.

  But Artemis seemed not in the slightest bit discomfited by the experience. In fact to Ellie she seemed to be relishing the back to front meal, conversing non-stop from the moment the waiter left the table. Having pumped Ellie all day about her life and times, it was now Artemis’s turn to tell her story.

  ‘Mother killed when I was three. Lived with Papa and stepmama in the country. In a house. And that’s about it.’

  ‘Was it a nice house?’ asked Ellie as she wrestled to keep down roast duck on top of Camembert.

  ‘Nice,’ Artemis mused. ‘Yes I suppose one could call it nice.’

  ‘And yet your family sold it.’

  ‘No. I sold it.’

  Having finished every morsel of her chicken, Artemis put her knife and fork down together, and took a sip of wine, while Ellie stared at her, her duck only half finished.

  ‘What’s the duck like?’ Artemis asked, leaning across and taking a bit. ‘Mmmmm,’ she concluded, having sampled it. ‘Not bad actually.’

  ‘Why did you sell your house?’

  ‘I didn’t want it,’ Artemis replied. ‘Too big.’ She pointed a long finger at Ellie. ‘You’re going to lose.’

  ‘So where will you live?’ Ellie asked, struggling with her next forkful.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a problem,’ Artemis said. ‘Now tell me more about Madame. Do you think she was a harlot?’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’ Ellie nearly choked.

  ‘Why?’ Artemis asked, looking very puzzled. ‘She was French.’

  ‘Not all Frenchwomen are harlots!’ Ellie retorted.

  ‘Frenchwomen practically invented “it”, didn’t you know?’ Artemis wiped up a little bit of sauce she had left on her plate with a little finger. ‘She doesn’t have to have been a proper harlot. You know, in a brothel. But from what you’ve said – anyway, there’s nothing wrong.’ Artemis shrugged. ‘D. H. Lawrence says if a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she’s as dry as a stick. Have you got any harlot in you?’

  ‘How in heck would I know?’ Ellie asked, feeling her cheeks redden.

  Artemis sighed, wiping her mouth carefully on her napkin. ‘I’d give anything to go to a brothel,’ she said wistfully. ‘I mean to see what one looks like.’

  Not knowing how best to deal with the way the conversation was developing, Ellie bowed her head and did her best to finish her roast duck which was now stone cold.

  ‘Do you know anything about making love?’ Artemis asked suddenly, breaking the long silence.

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘Not really. I think about it sometimes. Do you?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Ellie confessed.

  ‘How often?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Artemis fell silent again, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling, while Ellie struggled on with her cold duck.

  ‘When you do think about it,’ Artemis eventually asked, ‘what do you think about?’

  ‘I guess I think about someone – I don’t know –’ Ellie’s colour deepened. ‘I guess I think about someone with their arms round me –’

  ‘A man, I hope,’ Artemis interrupted, turning her gaze on Ellie.

  ‘Well of course!’ Ellie protested and then dropped her voice as she saw someone on the next table turn to stare. ‘I think about a man putting his arms around me,’ she whispered, ‘and we’re walking along, and he’s holding my hand. And he’s being loving. You know. I guess I just think about someone being loving.’ Ellie looked up from her food and saw that Artemis was staring at her with profound disbelief, her blue eyes opened as wide as they could go.

  ‘Don’t you kiss or anything?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ said Ellie now mortified with embarrassment. ‘Sure – I suppose we kiss.’

  ‘Have you ever kissed anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither have I. No that’s not true,’ Artemis corrected herself. ‘Someone kissed me at a party two years ago, but that didn’t really count as we both had our mouths closed.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Ellie frowned at her. ‘What do you mean – that doesn’t count?’

  ‘Because we both had our mouths closed, you idiot,’ Artemis repeated. ‘Which doesn’t count as kissing.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘You must have been to the films, haven’t you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well.’ Artemis shrugged. ‘It seems they kiss differently in films. At least that’s what Rosie told me. And once she made me hide with her under the back stairs so as she could spy on one of the footmen kissing the maids. But the funny thing was, it wasn’t a maid we saw him kissing. It was one of the weekend guests.’

  Ellie grinned. ‘A woman, I hope,’ she returned.

  Artemis just stared deadpan at her. ‘Don’t you want to hear how they kissed?’

  ‘Not particularly. I guess I’d rather wait until it happens to me.’

  The waiter came, cleared away their plates, and now set the fish course in front of them. Ellie sighed and stared down at the filleted sole.

  ‘Look,’ Artemis suggested. ‘Why don’t you just give me your fiver now? Sorry. I mean your fifteen bucks.’

  ‘No chance,’ Ellie rejoined. ‘It’s getting easier by the dish.’

  ‘Really?’ Artemis smiled coolly. ‘Wait till you get to the vermicelli rissoles.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Artemis announced, as they swayed back to their cabins, grabbing the polished handrails on either side of them to steady themselves as the liner plunged and rolled, ‘tomorrow we shall be foreigners. Do you speak French, or German, or Italian, or Spanish, or Greek, or Russian or anything?’

  ‘Only American,’ Ellie replied.

  ‘Oh God,’ Artemis sighed, as Ellie unlocked their door. ‘Another whole day of pants and suspenders, knickers and purses. Oh yes! And trunks! Don’t you say trunks for boots?’

  ‘What sort of boots?’ Ellie asked, as they tumbled into the suite.

  ‘The sort of boots you call trunks,’ Artemis replied.

  ‘We don’t call boots trunks,’ Ellie said. ‘We call boots just the same as you do. Boots. What we call trunks are the luggage compartments in motor cars.’

  ‘That’s what we call boots,’ Artemis said, flopping on to the sofa. ‘We call the luggage bits on motor cars boots.’

  ‘So what do you call boots then?’ Ellie enquired, sitting down beside Artemis and kicking off her shoes. ‘As in what you put on your feet.’

  ‘We call
them boots,’ Artemis yawned. ‘What do you call them?’

  ‘We call them boots as well,’ Ellie said.

  ‘Yes? So then what do you call trunks?’

  ‘We’ve just established that,’ Ellie replied. ‘Boots.’

  ‘Trunks as in bathing trunks.’

  ‘Trunks.’

  ‘Trunks as in luggage.’

  ‘Trunks.’

  ‘We have more in common than I thought. Time for bed. Tomorrow we shall pretend to be foreigners.’

  Artemis started to pull herself up from the sofa, but because of the increasingly rough seas, she found it even more difficult than usual. Ellie got up and went to help her.

  ‘No!’ Artemis’s eyes flashed at Ellie, as she shook off Ellie’s helping hand. ‘I’ll tell you if I need help, thank you,’ Artemis told her, still trying to struggle to her feet.

  ‘I offered to help you,’ Ellie told her, ‘not because I thought you needed it, but because I wanted to, OK?’

  ‘No it is not “OK”.’

  ‘Fine. Then that’s OK with me. You just go right ahead.’

  Ellie stood back and offered no further assistance as Artemis tried again to get up off the sofa and on to her feet, while the ship rose and fell in the heavy seas. Finally she conceded defeat, and she lay back with her eyes closed.

  ‘“OK”,’ she said, extending a long slender arm out to Ellie.

  Ellie ignored it.

  ‘I cannot – get up, Eleanor,’ Artemis said, as if to a child.

  ‘I can see that,’ Ellie said. ‘And I’ll help you up when you say sorry, Artemis.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ Artemis said, after a silence.

  ‘“OK”,’ Ellie replied and went back into her bedroom.

  Artemis stared at the now closed adjoining door and tried once more to get up. But she couldn’t stand. The sofa was too deep, the sea was too rough, and she had drunk far too much. And her cane was the other side of the stateroom. And her head was beginning to swim, quite violently. So rather than slip off the sofa now Ellie had gone, and crawl her way into her own cabin, Artemis lay back and closed her eyes, hoping the feeling of increasing nausea would abate. But it didn’t. It got increasingly worse. She started to go hot and then cold, and the sweat began to run off her brow, until she knew she could contain her sickness no longer.

  ‘Eleanor!’ she called, marooned on the sofa.

  She moaned and groaned and swore almost inaudibly to herself, wrapping her arms round the cramps in her stomach, before using the last of her strength to call out once more.

  ‘Eleanor quickly!’

  The sea was calmer now and moonlight was shining on to Artemis’s bed, as she lay between the cool sheets, a cold flannel on her forehead and Ellie sitting by her side.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll pretend to be foreigners tomorrow,’ Artemis said, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘Pretending to be a foreigner wouldn’t make you as sick as eating a six-course dinner backwards,’ Ellie argued.

  ‘It wasn’t the dinner, you idiot,’ Artemis countered. ‘Or the storm. It was the Martinis.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Yes, sure,’ Artemis echoed mockingly. ‘I’ll just have to switch drinks. There must be plenty of other cocktails you can have olives with.’

  ‘You were as green as a bean when you got up from the table,’ Ellie said, removing the flannel and feeling Artemis’s brow.

  ‘Rubbish. And do stop fussing.’

  ‘You really were very sick,’ Ellie said, with sudden relish.

  ‘No I wasn’t,’ Artemis disagreed. ‘I just was mad to have had that last dry martini on top of the soup and caviar. And it’s “OK”. I’m all right. You can go back to bed now.’

  ‘Look,’ Ellie sighed patiently, ‘let’s just get one thing straight, shall we? I’m not one of your servants you can just order around, “all right”?’

  ‘I never said you were.’

  ‘You don’t have to say, Artemis. You just do. Now settle back, lie back and I’ll wait with you till you’ve gone to sleep.’

  ‘I don’t need you to wait.’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  Ellie waited, despite Artemis’s disapproving sighs. And in spite of her disapproval, Artemis closed her eyes and turned on her side.

  After five minutes, Ellie stood up very quietly, put out the bedside light and prepared to tiptoe back to her cabin.

  ‘When we get to Ireland, Eleanor,’ a voice said from the bed behind her, ‘I think I might rent a house and we can go and stay there for a while. Somewhere by a lake.’

  Ellie turned back and looked down on the girl in the bed, who was still lying with her back to her.

  ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘So did I. I am.’

  ‘OK. So sleep.’

  ‘OK.’

  7

  Ellie couldn’t wait to get topside fast enough and ran all the way up to the bridge, so as to be in plenty of time to catch the first sight of land. At dinner the night before, the captain had invited both of the girls up to the bridge in the morning when the liner would be off the coast of Ireland. Ellie had their steward call them before first light. She herself had jumped straight out of bed, but Artemis just groaned and pulled the covers back over her when Ellie tried in vain to raise her.

  So Ellie left her in bed, pulled on her clothes, and hurried up on deck.

  When she reached the bridge, she found they were still well out to sea, but as the sun started to rise before her, Ellie began to make out a line of cliffs through the sea fret, and then the faint outline of the country behind it. The first mate identified the landfall for Ellie as Mizen Head, which in the early days of transatlantic sailing had, it seemed, been a graveyard for ships. But, he assured her, the S.S. Baltimore would keep well and safely out to sea until she had rounded Cape Clear when she would change her course and head for Cork sheltered by the coast.

  There had only been a slight swell on the Atlantic for the fourth day of their journey, but now even those gently rolling waves slowly subsided as the ship entered waters as calm as a millpond. The morning sun hung in a cloudless light-blue sky, and as the liner sailed ever closer to the mainland, Ellie could understand why Ireland was called the Emerald Isle, for she had never before seen fields of such a green. Off Kinsale, where after a brief flurry of activity on the bridge, with bells telegraphing the captain’s directions to the engineroom far below, the liner finally came to a stop to take on board the pilot who was to guide the ship safely into Cobh. As they waited, Ellie could see seals basking in the sunshine on the rocks, paying scant attention to the fishermen as they rowed out in longboats to haul in their lobster pots.

  Finally, with the pilot aboard and giving the orders the S.S. Baltimore set sail again halfspeed ahead.

  ‘Apparently we don’t actually dock in the harbour itself,’ Ellie explained to Artemis as she heaved her luggage through into the stateroom, which had become their joint property from that first evening. ‘We’re too big, so we drop anchor offshore and then those of us who are disembarking here are taken ashore by tender.’

  Artemis was sitting in an armchair reading a book and drinking coffee.

  ‘I take it you’ve packed?’

  ‘Packed?’ Artemis queried, without looking up from her book. ‘No – why should I?’

  ‘Because we have to go up to immigration in the lounge. We disembark in half an hour’

  ‘In that case you’d better ring the bell,’ Artemis frowned, carefully turning a page, ‘and send down for someone.’

  Ellie looked at her calmly reading and went to say something, but instead she went through to the bedroom with the intention of doing Artemis’s packing for her. One long look and Ellie turned and went straight back into the stateroom.

  ‘What happened in there, Artemis?’ she demanded. ‘They left that as neat as a pin when we got back from dinner last night.’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Artemis replied, without looking
up from her book. ‘I just got undressed and went to bed. And then got up again. And I am trying to read.’

  ‘It looks as though there’s been a pitched battle in there!’ Ellie complained. ‘Now come on. Come and give me a hand. I can’t possibly pack you up without your help.’

  ‘What?’ Artemis stared at Ellie blankly, as if she had taken total leave of her senses. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said come and give me a hand.’

  Artemis continued to stare at Ellie for a moment, and then she got up slowly and rang for a steward, who arrived almost immediately, hardly before Artemis had time to sit back down.

  ‘Steward,’ Artemis said, picking up her book and not even looking at him. ‘Would you please send someone up to do my packing? As quickly as you can.’ Then she looked up at the old steward and smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she added.

  ‘My pleasure, my lady,’ the steward replied. ‘I’ll see to it at once.’

  Artemis turned her smile from the steward to Ellie, before returning to her reading.

  ‘So that’s how you pack in England,’ said Ellie dryly. ‘I always did wonder.’

  ‘Do you remember what I said?’ Artemis suddenly asked Ellie over lunch at the hotel. ‘About getting a house here, that night I was tight? It would be fun, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It would be great,’ said Ellie warmly, ‘but I have to earn my living. I have to find a job.’

  ‘Why?’ Artemis asked, carefully scraping the last bit of white meat from her lobster. ‘I’ve got some money.’

  ‘It’s a nice idea,’ Ellie replied, putting down her fork. ‘But let’s just leave it at that, shall we?’

  ‘It isn’t an idea,’ Artemis said, ‘it’s a fact. And you’re not leaving the claw, are you?’ She looked up at Ellie from under her red hat. ‘You can’t leave the claw.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘And do stop saying pardon me,’ Artemis sighed, leaning over and breaking the claw of Ellie’s lobster open for her. ‘It’s terribly common. You don’t say pardon me, you say “what” in England or Ireland. That’s the best part – the claw.’

  They were lunching in the Metropole Hotel, with Artemis obviously determined that life was going to carry on as seamlessly as it had onboard ship, and Ellie trying to savour what she knew were the last hours before she pulled herself together and faced reality.