In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 38

  The national anthem followed and everyone stood up. One or two of the congregation began to sing the words, but they were soon drowned out by a howl of anguished crying from the back of the church. The curious turned round to stare at whoever it was, while the more polite faced the altar, or held their children tightly to their sides to stifle their curiosity.

  Artemis recognized who was crying instinctively and went at once to take the young woman outside and into the fresh September air.

  Rosie’s face was blotched red. ‘I’m so sorry, your ladyship!’ she sobbed as Artemis led her to a wooden seat in the graveyard. ‘It’s not me, you see! I’m not crying for me! It’s ’cos like we’re ’avin’ a baby, see!’

  ‘It’s all right, Rosie,’ Artemis said, sitting her down. ‘You’ll be quite safe down here. In the country.’

  ‘No, your ladyship!’ Rosie gasped, trying her best to stem the flood of tears, ‘it’s Jack, see! He’s joinin’ up! An’ ’e’s goin’ to get isself killed!’

  They sat and watched the congregation file out of church. Some of the men, those in their middle- or late-twenties, were walking taller now, with their shoulders back, as if their purpose had finally been decided for them, while the older men looked introspective or thoughtful. And then there were the boys, young lads of fifteen or sixteen, some hoping the war would be a quick thing, and others that it would last until they were old enough to go and fight themselves. They were followed or accompanied by their women; wives, mothers, sisters. Some of them with faces quite ashen from the shock while others wept into their handkerchieves, their heads half-turned away in grief, as if they were already mourners at a loved one’s funeral. All of them held on to the hands or the arms of their menfolk, as if uncertain of how much longer they had to love them and enjoy their company.

  Hugo was the last to leave the church with the vicar. He had stood and talked to those he knew and those he half-knew and to those who were strangers, a word here, a smile, a nod, or just a hand on an arm. And now, as Ellie talked to one of their farmer’s wives, he stood momentarily alone, gazing up into the clear blue of the midday sky, as if that was where their salvation lay.

  There were just the three of them for lunch, Hugo, Ellie and Artemis. Charles had been intending to come down for the weekend, but events had overtaken him and he telephoned Artemis the night before to say all leave had been cancelled.

  ‘Have you any idea what’s happening?’ she had asked him when they had spoken. ‘When the balloon goes up, where will they send you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he laughed, ‘and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t be allowed to tell you.’

  There was a short silence, during which neither of them could think of what to say. Charles broke it. ‘You know what I’m going to ask?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘If I say yes now, you’ll think I’m only doing so because – well. You know.’

  ‘I don’t care. Just please say you’ll marry me.’

  ‘I can’t, Charles.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know why not.’

  ‘I don’t care, Artemis. I love you, that’s all that matters. So please say you’ll marry me.’

  ‘I can’t, Charles.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter that you don’t love me.’

  ‘It does to me, Charles.’

  ‘Why? Don’t you realize I could be sent abroad any moment?’ Artemis remained silent. ‘Artemis, darling,’ Charles said. ‘Please. Please say you’ll marry me.’

  ‘Charles,’ Artemis replied after a moment. ‘Charles if you want me to come up to London, and stay with you, I will. But I won’t marry you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why do you think? It would be silly.’

  Charles thought about it, and then laughed. ‘That’s why I love you, Artemis,’ he said. ‘You’re right. It would be silly. Damn silly.’

  ‘If I married Charles,’ Artemis explained to Ellie and Hugo, ‘and I don’t know,’ she shrugged, ‘say the war’s over in six months. A year. Less. And he doesn’t get killed. Then we’re stuck with each other.’

  ‘You mean you’re stuck with him,’ Hugo said, picking at his food.

  ‘You can be just as stuck with somebody you love who doesn’t love you as you can with somebody you don’t love who loves you. If you see what I mean.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ellie. ‘I do.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Hugo frowned. ‘But I admire your principles, Tom.’

  Apart from that diversion, the talk was all exigency plans. Hugo had already made arrangements for all the art treasures and the fine furniture to be sealed away deep in the vaults which ran below the house. Ellie said that she couldn’t see the point because if the Germans invaded, they’d certainly find anything hidden around the estate, but Hugo told her that was not the object of the exercise. He was adopting a more optimistic point of view, namely that there would be no invasion, but if the war was a long one, houses such as Brougham would be requisitioned for other purposes, just as they had been during the last war, and so it would not be sensible to leave the place furnished as it was.

  ‘And supposing you’re wrong?’ Ellie asked. ‘Supposing there is an invasion?’

  ‘You want to talk about that now?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Ellie said. ‘And then I must go and feed James Michael.’

  This was the first Artemis had heard about Ellie’s feeding methods. ‘You’re not actually feeding it yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘Him,’ Ellie replied. ‘And yes, of course I am. And do try not to look quite so disgusted.’

  Artemis stared at her, then looked at Hugo, and then back at Ellie. ‘Really?’ she said, still unable to believe it. ‘And you’re going to go on feeding it?’

  ‘Him,’ Ellie sighed. ‘And yes, I am. And now can we go on with what we were talking about?’

  ‘Good God,’ Artemis said, half to herself. ‘How weird.’

  Ellie turned to Hugo and reminded him of her question. Hugo paused for a moment, drumming his fingers on the dining table. ‘It’s not as easy as that,’ he said finally. ‘I mean for a start, you’re an American, and whatever warning noises Mr Roosevelt has made this year and last, the feeling is that it’s a case of once bitten. You know. America feels it won the last war and saved the world, and never got thanked for it.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Seriously, Ell. That’s what I’ve been told. They haven’t even been paid back the money they lent us. It’s not that America is unsympathetic – far from it. They’ll want us to win. But – or at least as they tell me – they don’t quite see why they should sacrifice their young men at the altar of the British Empire.’

  ‘Let’s leave that aside for the moment. I’m married to an Englishman, and I live in England, I now feel English.’

  ‘Then,’ said Hugo, looking at her in the eye, ‘in that case they’ll probably line you up against the wall and shoot you with the rest of us.’

  ‘No,’ said Artemis firmly. ‘Rather than that, I vote we all shoot each other.’

  ‘We can’t all shoot each other, Tom,’ Hugo said. ‘Ellie shoots you, I shoot Ellie, who shoots me?’

  ‘I shoot you, as you shoot Ellie, as Ellie shoots me,’ Artemis sighed, as if Hugo was missing out on what two and two made. ‘Look.’ She made her hand into a mock gun and held it up, index finger pointing barrel-like at Hugo’s head. ‘Go on,’ she instructed Hugo and then Ellie. ‘And you. Go on.’

  The three of them sat there, an index finger pointed at each other’s heads.

  ‘One, two, three,’ Artemis counted. ‘Bang.’

  ‘One, two, three – bang,’ said Hugo thoughtfully, his finger still pointed at Ellie’s temple. Then he lowered it. ‘Surely it would be much easier just to shoot ourselves?’ he asked.

  ‘What about James?’

  ‘I’d shoot my horses,’ Artemis put in. ‘And Brutus.’

  ‘I’m talking about my b
aby.’

  ‘And I’m talking about my horses, and my dog,’ said Artemis.

  Ellie looked blankly at Artemis and then got up and left the table. Hugo sighed a deep sigh and shook his head at Artemis as he rose to go after his wife.

  ‘No,’ said Artemis.

  ‘I hope you’re not forbidding me to go after my wife, Tom,’ Hugo said.

  ‘Yes I am,’ Artemis replied, reaching for her stick. ‘It’s about time I learned to pick up my own pieces.’

  By the time Artemis had followed on upstairs, Ellie was already in the nursery preparing to feed her baby.

  ‘I shouldn’t come in if I were you,’ she said to Artemis. ‘You’ll probably be sick.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a wet nurse?’ Artemis asked, standing in the doorway. ‘Or bottle feed, like everyone else?’

  ‘Either come in or out,’ Ellie said, ignoring the question. ‘Don’t just stand there in the doorway.’

  ‘Where’s your nanny?’ Artemis asked, shutting the door behind her and going to look through into the other rooms.

  ‘I sent her home,’ Ellie said, ‘on Thursday. Her family live on the coast, in a place called Hornsea – would that be right?’

  ‘Probably.’ Artemis now wandered over to the windows, keeping her back firmly turned on Ellie and her baby.

  ‘Apparently Hornsea could be a likely target if there’s to be a surprise attack,’ Ellie continued. ‘And Nanny was very worried about her parents.’ She fell to silence, her head bowed. Artemis could see the reflection of the mother and baby in the window, reminding her of a painting she had seen, of a girl in a pale red dress just as Ellie was now wearing, bent tenderly and lovingly over the child at her breast. She stared at the image, unable to take her eyes off it.

  ‘Did you want something?’

  ‘Yes,’ Artemis replied. ‘I came up to say sorry for being so stupid. For saying what I said. But I’m not sorry.’

  ‘That’s nothing new. Tell me something I don’t know,’ said Ellie absently. She hadn’t looked up, so she was unaware that Artemis was actually staring directly at her and the baby.

  ‘I mean I’m not sorry I was so rude. And so stupid,’ Artemis continued, ‘because if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have had to come up here to apologize.’

  ‘And?’ Ellie now looked up and saw the expression on Artemis’s face.

  ‘Would it be all right? Or rather would it be “OK”? You know – if after you’ve finished I held Jamie?’

  After the initial alarms and excursions of the first weekend of war, when four barrage balloons caught fire at Portsmouth after being struck by lightning, causing the inhabitants to believe the invasion had already begun, and the deliberate false alarm organized by the government to test London’s population to the air raid warning system, in Britain nothing warlike occurred at all. There was no invasion, or even hint of it. Neither were there any air raids, nor gas attacks. The only indications that the country was at war were at sea, where from the very beginning the fighting was ruthless. Before September was out, the Germans had torpedoed and sunk the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous. Which was why initially Hugo resolutely refused Ellie permission to go to America.

  In late October, out of the blue, Ellie had received a letter from her father, the first he’d written to her since she had emigrated. That was the first shock. The second was that it had not been sent from Westfield Drive but from an altogether smarter part of Boston, on the right side of the tracks. The third shock was the worst and was the reason why Ellie was determined to recross the Atlantic. Madame Gautier was seriously ill and was asking for her.

  Ellie reasoned that since America was neutral, if she travelled on an American ship, she would be in no danger. But Hugo opposed the idea vigorously, particularly since Ellie intended taking the baby with her.

  ‘Madame Gautier was like a mother to me, Hugo,’ Ellie argued. ‘She was also my best friend. She’s told my father she won’t die happy unless she sees me.’

  But Hugo wouldn’t relent and showed no signs of so doing, until one day towards the end of October he returned from one of his trips to London in a very different frame of mind.

  ‘You can go to America, Ellie,’ he told her the same evening, as they sat in the little sitting room in front of the fire, ‘but only conditionally. If the war worsens, which everyone thinks it must, you have to stay in America, and that’s an order. You and Jamie stay there until it’s safe to come home.’

  ‘I see,’ Ellie said. ‘And what about you?’

  ‘They’ve found me something to do, at last, and I’m not going to be able to spend much more time up here at Brougham. So you might as well take your trip now, while you can.’

  ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’ Ellie put an arm around his neck and kissed the side of his face. ‘You can’t fool me.’

  ‘I’m being sent abroad, Ellie, but I’m not sure when. It might even be next week. And I can’t say where.’

  ‘Do you know?’

  Hugo nodded.

  ‘What are you doing, Hugo? Can’t you tell me?’

  ‘Not really, Ell. All I can tell you is it’s advisory.’

  ‘Is that the official word for spying?’

  ‘No, Ell,’ Hugo smiled. ‘I promise I’m not going to be a spy.’ He threw another log on to the fire and stared into it for a while, falling silent. ‘The other condition, Ellie,’ he said finally, ‘the second condition is that if anything happens to me, if I get killed, you’re to stay in America.’

  Ellie prodded the fire with the poker. ‘I’m not so sure I want to go now. Maybe I’ll stay here after all.’

  ‘No,’ and by his tone Ellie knew he meant no. ‘There’s talk of an invasion either at the end of the year, or the beginning of next. So I’d rather you went now, while nothing is going on, than try and get out when things have got really bad.’

  ‘I don’t want to go, Hugo. I mean it.’

  ‘You must go, Ellie. For Jamie. Now. You must.’

  ‘But what will I do without you, Hugo?’

  ‘What will any of us do, Ellie?’ Hugo sighed, holding her hand. ‘The whole world’s about to go up in flames, what can any of us do?’

  They held each other all night, never letting go for one moment. Outside the skies were dark but quiet, silent except for the screech of distant owls.

  ‘The cherry trees bend over, and are shedding

  On the old road where all that passed are dead,

  Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding

  This early May morn when there is none to wed.’

  As Ellie lay beside him, Hugo whispered the poem quietly to her, but only once he was sure she was asleep.

  ‘I’m going to be driving somebody in the government,’ Artemis stared down at Ellie’s dozing baby.

  ‘I hope they know what they’re letting themselves in for,’ Ellie answered, circling the bedroom once more on the look-out for anything forgotten. ‘I’d have said it would be safer for them to hike it, rather than have you drive them. Bombs and all.’

  ‘Do babies always dribble like this?’ Artemis asked, carefully wiping Jamie’s mouth with her handkerchief.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Ellie smiled, ‘this is my first, remember?’

  She seemed to have packed everything, as there was nothing more she could find which she imagined she might need for her stay in America. So after one last look at the room, Ellie snapped her suitcases shut and fastened the straps.

  ‘You’re very much the democrat, aren’t you?’ Artemis teased. ‘Rosie even packs my sponge bag.’

  Ellie rang the bell for Porter to come and fetch her luggage before coming to sit on the window seat beside Artemis. ‘I wish you were coming with us,’ Ellie said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Artemis. ‘I do, too. But England needs me,’ she added, poker-faced.

  ‘Like heck. You’ll do more damage driving round London than the entire German Army.’

  The baby in Artemis’s a
rms awoke for a moment, stared at the face above it, caught Artemis’s lip in one small pink hand, and gave a happy gurgle.

  ‘I didn’t tell you,’ Artemis said, for want of something to say. ‘At one of these ARP classes apparently, according to a friend in London who’s learning to be a warden, Rachel Durden-Jones. You met her, remember? Anyway, she was at this class where they had this gramophone record of exploding bombs. And because there were all these women present, they turned the volume down so that the bombs wouldn’t sound so loud.’

  Ellie smiled, and sat down to brush her hair in front of her mirror.

  ‘Oh and they spun me by the way,’ Artemis continued, ‘for any voluntary ambulance work, and the such like. Usual thing. My mobility problem. You know. Luckily Diana got me this job driving HM’s MPs about the place.’ She gave a little shrug and then added as an afterthought, ‘Could be interesting, I suppose.’

  Porter knocked on the half-open bedroom door and Ellie asked him to carry her luggage downstairs.

  ‘I start on Monday,’ Artemis said, as they followed the butler down the stairs and across the marbled hall, with Ellie now carrying her own baby. ‘Jenks is going to look after Brutus. I suppose one will just have to get back down here whenever possible.’

  The two women stood on top of the stone staircase outside while Ellie took a last look at her home. Nanny, back from her visit to Hornsea, was now hurrying across from the east wing, a suitcase in one hand and a large brown paper parcel under her other arm, which when she reached the waiting car she gave to Jenkins, who was waiting to drive them.

  ‘All the men have gone, I suppose,’ Artemis wondered out aloud, as Jenkins started to pile all the luggage into the estate Humber and Nanny hurried up the steps to take charge of the baby. ‘Gone, or just about to go.’

  Ellie kissed James Michael and then handed him over to his nurse. ‘I’m afraid so,’ she said. ‘We had a card from Roger and Paul. They’re waiting to go over to France.’

  ‘Roger and Paul?’ Artemis frowned, trying to give faces to the names.

  ‘Our two footmen,’ Ellie answered. ‘Roger and Paul.’