In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 20

  ‘Wait,’ Artemis ordered him as they were no more than halfway down the drive, ‘what did you do then? With that thing?’ Artemis pointed to the gear stick. ‘You moved it,’ she said, accusingly.

  ‘Of course I did, miss,’ Tutti replied. ‘Otherwise I could not have changed gear.’

  Artemis stared in unconcealed amazement as the butler proceeded to take the car up through the gears, until they were driving down the road at a steady and relatively quiet forty miles an hour, with only the wind noise now to pitch their voices against.

  ‘It goes backwards as well, miss,’ the butler told Artemis, after she had admitted her ignorance.

  ‘It doesn’t?’ wondered Artemis. ‘What – without pushing?’

  After they had arrived at Artemis’s hired house, which nestled in the woods on the shore of the beautiful lake, Artemis indicated all the things she wanted to take back to Strand House, and left Ellie and her hostess’ butler to do the packing, while she took herself off to practice changing gear up and down her drive. She returned after nearly three quarters of an hour, flushed with triumph and carrying her shoes.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ she announced. ‘Not only that, I even managed to get the wretched thing to go backwards.’

  ‘Great,’ Ellie said as they stood by the front door with all Artemis’s luggage. ‘But where’s the car now? I don’t see it.’

  ‘No, well you wouldn’t,’ Artemis replied. ‘It’s in the edge of the lake.’

  Soon it was high summer. The garden at Strand House resembled nothing less than something out of the tropics, full of lush vegetation and the fattest bumblebees Artemis had ever seen. The weather was particularly fine, with long hot days, and short warm nights, so that the chill went from the sea, and Artemis and Ellie took to bathing every day long before breakfast. Ellie might have been slow to master the knack of driving, but she soon learned to swim under Artemis’s excellent if somewhat impatient tutoring. She had to, otherwise she most probably would have drowned. For having spent the first few days of her coaching teaching Ellie the rudiments, with Ellie buoyed up on an inflated inner car tyre, one afternoon when the sea was as calm as a millpond, Artemis lured the unsuspecting Ellie well out of her depth, and then with the aid of a pin she had concealed, punctured her tyre. Ellie screamed for help and thrashed around as the air gurgled out from the rubber tube, but all Artemis did was swim away and yell at Ellie to follow her.

  Which Ellie did, having first swallowed what seemed like half of Bantry Bay. She found herself swimming, at first far too fast, as she thrashed through the water in her panic, and then, once she realized she was alive and afloat, slowly and with complete amazement.

  ‘Hey look at me!’ she yelled at Artemis, who was swimming ahead of her. ‘Look, Artemis! I’m swimming!’

  ‘Of course you are, you idiot!’ Artemis called back. ‘If you weren’t, you’d be drowning!’

  After that, the days took on an easy shape, with Ellie, after their morning swim, working on the house until midday, while Artemis lay reading in the garden, or helping Cousin Rose garden, followed by a long slow lunch outside, a doze and then either a trip in the car to fish somewhere, or to explore the coastline as far as Crow Head and sometimes even round into Ballydonegan Bay and beyond to the mouth of the great Kenmare river. Before dinner there would be a few games of croquet, Cousin Rose and Ellie against Artemis and Tutti, the latter being such a formidable combination, Ellie and her second cousin were rarely in serious contention. Then there would be dinner, which was invariably taken late, since the croquet matches were sometimes still being played as dusk was falling, particularly once they had changed the sides, and Artemis was saddled with playing with her hostess. For Cousin Rose had a style of croquet all her own, swinging the mallet not through her legs but round from the side, in a wildly disorganized arc. She also had a habit of hitting the wrong ball, since she was colour blind, and going the wrong way round the lawn, since she also seemed to be, as her butler described ‘directionally agnostic’.

  On occasion, when they finally sat down to yet another of Aggie’s delicious dinners, cooked, as Cousin Rose always said, at the grumble, Ellie wondered how she wasn’t dead from laughing, particularly since Artemis apparently took it all so seriously, trying to correct and control her partner’s lunatic swing and detailing complex tactical plans which Cousin Rose hadn’t the faintest chance of executing. They were never any of them in bed until well past one o’clock, but the two girls were always up with the dawn.

  One boiling hot morning, when Ellie had driven off with Tutti in the pony and trap to fetch some more bags of plaster, Artemis drove her little car down to the beach to take an extra dip. As always there was no-one about on what Ellie and she had now come to regard as their private strand, so, finding that she had left her bathing things back at the house, Artemis didn’t think twice about stripping down to her usual minimum and making straight for the sea.

  He must have arrived as she was swimming away from the shore, Artemis thought, as she stood treading water and wondering how she was to get to the safety of her car unnoticed, because she was quite certain there had been absolutely no-one about earlier. Yet there most certainly was someone there now, a man seated at an artist’s easel, halfway along the golden strand.

  It wasn’t so much the thought of the odd sight she would make in her soaking underthings that made Artemis swim as far out as she dared before turning to swim parallel to the shore but away from the stranger, but rather her natural reluctance to expose her infirmity to a total stranger. It had taken all her gum, as her godmother would have put it, to take that first dip that day with Ellie, so she was certainly more than a little unwilling to be seen stripped by a stranger.

  Not that it mattered to her personally, Artemis kept telling herself, as she swam steadily away from him, but it might give him a bit of a start.

  It was a long hike back to the car from where she finally came ashore, but it was worth it because she seemed quite safely out of vision, the artist appearing to be sitting with his back to her. She had left her cane where she had first got in the water, so her progress back towards the car was a little slower and more painful than usual.

  And then, alerted by Brutus’s delighted barking as he rejoined his mistress, he turned round. Artemis froze, her arms crossed protectively across her. She saw the sun glint on what she thought must be the man’s spectacles. He seemed to be staring directly at her, so she dropped to her knees, hoping the car would shield her from his sight as Brutus reached her and started smothering her with kisses. After a seemingly endless moment she looked up, and found that the man had turned away again, and was once more busy with his work, so busy that Artemis made the safety of the car unseen, where she then collapsed on to the nearside running board to catch her breath, while Brutus ran round in circles, barking with delight.

  It was so hot she had no need to dry herself. She just slipped straight into her clothes which she smuggled from the car, and was back in her Tyrolean blouse and long embroidered cotton skirt in no time. Now all she needed was her stick.

  ‘Fetch,’ she ordered Brutus, looking round the car and pointing to where it lay by the water’s edge. ‘Fetch it, you idiot.’ The dog ran off, wagging his tail and barking, and brought Artemis back a piece of seaweed. ‘No, you stupid hairy chump,’ Artemis scolded. ‘My stick. Look! Fetch!’

  This time Brutus retrieved a small piece of driftwood, which he dropped on Artemis’s left foot, and then wagged his tail in anticipation of his next exciting task.

  Artemis sat back against the car and sighed. Since the tide was nearly out when she had gone to swim, her stick was a good hundred yards from the car and thus directly in view of the painter. She knew she could make it, if she took it steadily, but she also knew that she would be seen, and if she was seen, the man might feel the need to get up and help her, and for some unknown reason that was the very last thing she felt she wanted.

  So she decided to remain where she was, until
such a time that the man either went home, or Brutus got it into his thick skull to retrieve it.

  ‘Is this yours?’

  Artemis looked up and saw a man in a straw hat with his back to the sun. He was holding up her stick.

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘I thought it might be,’ the man said, dropping it on the back seat. ‘Cheerio.’ He doffed his hat and went off in the direction from which he had come.

  Artemis had no idea of what he looked like, or of what age he might be, because his face had been in deep shadow with the sun right behind him. She pulled herself up, holding on to the side of the car, and looked after the retreating figure, who was ambling up towards the dunes, his easel under one arm, and his box of paints under the other, a tall untidy figure, in a fading canvas suit and bare feet, the song he was whistling fading away with him as his figure became just a shimmer in the haze of heat which hung over the dunes.

  ‘That’s very like John Piper,’ Artemis observed.

  The man in the straw hat turned round, surprised. Artemis saw she had been right and that he did wear glasses, very round and with brass frames. And that he was also young, serious and tall and good-looking, with long fair hair, grey-green eyes, and a deep sun tan.

  The artist dipped his brush in the mixture of oil and spirit and stared at his work. ‘Don’t you know that’s the rudest thing you can say to a painter?’ he asked amiably. ‘That something’s very like somebody else’s work?’

  ‘I like John Piper,’ Artemis replied. ‘I’d take that as a compliment.’

  ‘I like John Piper too,’ he agreed. ‘But I still don’t take that as a compliment.’

  He began to paint again and Artemis watched in silence.

  ‘I’ve been here for ages,’ Artemis suddenly announced.

  ‘Yes I know,’ the painter replied, disappointing Artemis who imagined she had surprised him, so quietly had she approached his easel. ‘Where’s the dog?’ he enquired, without looking round.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just wondered. He looks rather a nice sort of chap.’

  ‘He’s totally brainless and extremely vain,’ Artemis informed him. ‘And I left him behind because he drank seawater yesterday and did what he shouldn’t all over the person I’m staying with’s bathmat.’

  There followed another long silence, broken only by a sigh from Artemis, which made the artist momentarily stop painting. He looked round at her, to find she was still staring at his work.

  ‘Something the matter?’ he asked.

  Artemis shook her head without looking at him. ‘You must have been here ages,’ she said. ‘Judging from your suntan.’

  ‘I’ve only been here a couple of days,’ the painter replied. ‘I got the tan in Egypt.’

  ‘Are you an archeologist?’

  ‘Not really. My father is. In an amateur way. He spends quite a lot of time in the Middle East.’

  Artemis took off her large floppy sun hat and ruffled out her short blonde hair, staring out to sea. ‘I’m Artemis Deverill, by the way,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Hugo Tanner,’ he replied, and then resumed painting.

  ‘Is that what you were?’ Artemis asked. ‘Tanners?’

  Hugo Tanner looked out at the view he was painting, and then started to mix a colour on his palette. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘My father was a brewer before he retired. And my grandfather was. And my great-grandfather.’

  ‘So really you should be called Brewer.’

  ‘Probably.’

  Artemis put her hat back on and leaned on her stick. ‘Do you like Stanley Spencer?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve only seen the stuff at the Tate,’ Hugo replied. ‘And the War Museum. I’m not sure I care for it.’

  ‘He had a state of sureness, you know. Unlike most painters. That’s why he could see Cookham, where he lived, as Heaven. And Jesus living there. Because of it. It must be rather nice. Having a state of sureness.’

  ‘Really?’ Hugo mixed some more paint.

  ‘I think so.’ Artemis leaned forward to stare more closely at the painting. ‘You’ve been influenced by the post-Impressionists.’

  Hugo stopped painting and looked round at the young woman behind him. Once again, she paid no attention whatsoever, but merely continued to study his work, allowing him time to take her in. She was very pretty, standing there with her floppy brimmed straw hat back on her head, hands sunk deep in the pockets of her long white cotton skirt, slender and tanned, and with a pair of the brightest blue eyes he had ever seen. But there was something sad about her, too, which seemed to have nothing to do with her infirmity, but concerned something unseen, something metaphysical.

  ‘The island isn’t right,’ she ventured out of the silence.

  ‘It’s only a sketch,’ Hugo replied. ‘I’ve hardly begun the island.’

  ‘You’ve made it look like a whale,’ Artemis continued.

  ‘It won’t do when I’ve finished,’ Hugo assured her, somewhat tetchily.

  Artemis turned and looked at him, blankly, as if she didn’t believe a word of it. ‘I’m going now,’ she announced. ‘Goodbye.’

  The next morning the car was there before Hugo was, but as he set up his easel, he could see no sign of the girl. He looked out into the bay in case she was swimming, but could see no-one, so he continued with his preparations, opening his canvas stool, mixing the linseed and turpentine, squeezing out the worms of colour on to his palette, and selecting his brushes. By the time he had been painting for an hour, and there was still no sign of her, Hugo suddenly stopped as the thought hit him. He stood up, scanning the calm sea, and then putting down his palette, his brushes and his paint rag, he ran at speed to the water’s edge, for some reason expecting at any moment to catch sight in the water of a dead and floating body.

  What he found instead was a set of human footprints headed west where the tide had receded, two bare feet and the imprint of a walking stick. By the human footmarks were the spores of a madly circling dog, who had obviously been running round and round its owner and in and out of the water. Shielding his eyes against the glare, Hugo looked to where the beach curled to an end, before disappearing round the headland, and sure enough, just coming back into sight out of the shimmering haze were the figures of a young woman and her dog.

  Hugo was back and hard at work by the time Artemis walked by.

  ‘Hello!’ she called, but more en passant than in greeting.

  ‘Good morning!’ Hugo called back, doffing his old straw hat. ‘Beautiful again, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’ Artemis stopped and peered at Hugo from under one hand held to the brim of her own hat.

  ‘The weather!’ Hugo called back, feeling rather fatuous.

  ‘Oh!’ Artemis dropped the hand from her hat and waved with it, once. ‘I’m going to be late for lunch!’

  ‘If you wait I’ll walk back with you!’ Hugo shouted, beginning hastily to pack up.

  She didn’t wait, but Hugo still caught up with her easily, because her car was parked down the far end of the strand.

  ‘You don’t work for very long,’ she said.

  ‘It’s quite long enough in this heat,’ Hugo replied. ‘And anyway, I do some more when I get home. After I’ve eaten.’

  ‘You don’t work from photographs?’ Artemis turned to him and stared, almost accusingly.

  ‘Why?’ Hugo asked. ‘I have done, yes. But no – not on this sort of painting. No.’

  Artemis walked on, replying nothing.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Hugo asked.

  ‘For a walk.’

  ‘I know that. I saw you coming round the point.’

  ‘Yes?’ Artemis stared out to sea.

  ‘I haven’t been round the point,’ Hugo said. ‘What’s it like?’

  Artemis shrugged. ‘Go and see,’ she told him.

  ‘Is it worth it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t tell you to go and see if it wasn’t.’

  ‘What’s round there?’
/>
  ‘More sea,’ Artemis said. ‘And more sand.’ And then she smiled at him, the first smile she’d smiled at him, more from the eyes than the mouth, the sun coming out from behind a cloud. ‘And there are seals,’ she said. ‘Masses of seals. Would you like a lift?’

  She drove him back up from the beach, along the dusty sandy track and up to the road.

  ‘Which way now?’

  ‘This is fine,’ Hugo told her. ‘I can walk from here. You’re going to be late.’

  ‘No I’m not,’ Artemis replied, engaging first gear. ‘If you can walk it, it can’t be that far.’ She turned and looked at him questioningly, as she continued to drive down the middle of the road.

  ‘Turn left. And I’m just down the bottom there.’

  ‘Yes, there’s a whole colony of seals round the point,’ Artemis told him, as they drove along, hatless, with the wind ruffling their hair. ‘I’ve made friends with one.’

  ‘Not with the dog in tow, surely?’

  Artemis suddenly laughed, once, and then stared at Hugo as if he were mad. ‘The dog?’ she said, looking in the mirror at the happy panting sight behind her. ‘That silly idiot went and hid.’

  The road was a cul-de-sac, ending in a sand dune. To one side, on a hard standing by a rough field, was a gypsy caravan, painted red with yellow scrolls and curliques.

  ‘Tinker, tailor,’ Artemis said, staring at it, ‘brewer, tanner? Painter?’

  ‘I’m on holiday,’ Hugo smiled. ‘It’s not my profession.’

  ‘What fun,’ Artemis said. ‘Goodbye.’

  And drove off.

  ‘There are tinkers below, madam,’ Tutti told Cousin Rose at lunch. ‘Below in the field.’

  ‘Do we need anything fixing, man?’ Cousin Rose asked.

  ‘That’s not my affair, madam,’ the butler replied. ‘That’s for Aggie to say.’

  ‘Then ax her so,’ his employer instructed. ‘Ax her if she’s any pots or pans.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re tinkers?’ Artemis enquired, filleting her fresh mackerel.