In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 39

  ‘Porter won’t go,’ Artemis said, ‘because of course he must be over the age. What is it? Forty one or something, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ellie agreed. ‘No Porter won’t be called up.’

  ‘No,’ Artemis nodded. ‘And neither of course will you, Jenks. Thank heavens.’

  ‘Morning, ma’am,’ Jenkins said to Ellie, holding open the car door. ‘’Fraid the weather’s gone.’

  It had begun to rain again, a cold and heavy rain which swept across the parkland in grey drifts. Ever since that fateful first Sunday of September it seemed to have done nothing but rain.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll come to the station,’ Artemis said looking past Ellie. ‘I’m not very good at stations.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ said Ellie.

  ‘We’d better say goodbye here then.’

  ‘We’d better.’

  Artemis brushed a stray lock of blonde hair from over one blue eye and looked at Ellie. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’

  Ellie didn’t reply leaving Artemis to take the initiative.

  After a moment, Artemis rather formally kissed Ellie on both cheeks. ‘Write if you have time,’ she said gravely.

  ‘Of course I will,’ Ellie replied. ‘’Bye, Tom.’

  It was the first time Ellie has used Hugo’s nickname for Artemis, and for a moment it caught Artemis off guard. She hesitated and stared at Ellie, not knowing what to say. And then she collected herself and flashed Ellie a smile.

  ‘Cheerio,’ she said, before turning and walking away from the car, jabbing her stick into the gravel.

  Hugo was waiting for Ellie at Paddington. She kissed him, then took his arm, while Nanny followed on with the baby.

  There was an army staff car waiting for them, with a uniformed girl driver, who stood smartly to attention as she opened the car door for the party. Ellie was impressed.

  ‘They certainly haven’t signed you up just to push a pen, have they?’ she said as she got into the back of the car.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Hugo said, climbing in beside her, as Nanny and her charge were put in the front. ‘How was the journey?’

  ‘Fine.’

  The car was to take them across London to Waterloo station, where Ellie, Nanny and Jamie were to catch the boat-train to Southampton. Ellie, never letting go of Hugo’s hand for one moment, asked him if it was still impossible for him to accompany them to the docks, and he told her that hard as he had tried, he only had an hour’s leave from duty.

  She had so much she wanted to say to Hugo that she ended up saying nothing at all. Instead she just sat gripping his hand like a child, looking out of her window at a city prepared for war, sandbagged and shuttered, its citizens going about their daily business with their gas mask boxes slung over their arms.

  ‘Things aren’t too bad up here at all,’ Hugo assured her. ‘Actually, to tell the truth you’d hardly know there was a war on. The feeling is it’ll all be over in six months, though some of us aren’t at all sure what Chamberlain’s masterplan is exactly.’ He smiled. ‘There’s an official pamphlet going the rounds, which explains that we don’t have to defeat the Nazis on land – all we’ve got to do is prevent them defeating us. There’s so little happening, they can hardly sell a newspaper at the moment.’

  Their car was held up for a moment behind a bus which was waiting to make a right turn. Hugo attracted Ellie’s attention to a newsvendor on the corner of Trafalgar Square. ‘That’s old Tommy, see?’ he said. ‘He’s a right card. Sells more papers to the unsuspecting than – than I don’t know. He caught me yesterday. And you know how? He shouts “Germans in . . . read all about! Germans in . . . read all about it!” And after you’ve bought the paper and can’t find a thing in it about wherever it is Germany’s meant to have invaded, and you ask him – you say where are the Germans now, Tommy? He says Berlin, guv’nor. Where they’ve always been.’

  ‘Not according to the village milkman,’ Ellie replied. ‘That’s not how he sees it at all. Cook says he’s been busy going round telling everyone that Romford would it be? And Chatham, and some other big dockland, that they’ve all been razed to the ground by bombing, and that the government’s hushed it all up, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ laughed Hugo.

  ‘And that there’s already a shortage of timber,’ Ellie continued, ‘because they’ve had to make so many coffins.’

  ‘And not just coffins, Mrs Tanner,’ Nanny reminded her from her seat in front. ‘But also the racks to store them.’

  ‘You don’t believe such nonsense, surely?’ Hugo asked them. ‘That’s just scaremongering.’

  ‘I don’t know what to believe any more, Hugo,’ Ellie replied. ‘No that’s not true,’ she corrected herself. ‘I just find it all unbelievable.’

  Through the car windscreen she could see the barrage balloons floating in the sky, held to earth by their mooring ropes. Hugo pointed out that the two visible hanging over Chelsea were nicknamed Flossie and Blossom, while the ones which could now be seen as they crossed the river, rising in the sky above County Hall had been named The Bishop of London and Herbert Morrison by the House of Commons.

  ‘I guess I’ll never really understand the English,’ Ellie said. ‘I suppose the idea is to joke Hitler out of this war.’

  ‘If only,’ Hugo replied. ‘If only.’

  At Waterloo they sat alone in the car while the driver unloaded the luggage, and Nanny walked discreetly up and down the station forecourt, with their sleeping baby in her arms. The station was thronged with parties of children being evacuated to the country, their names and destinations on labels attached to their coat buttons or strung round their necks, and their gas masks slung behind them. Trains drew out, slowly, creaking and billowing sooty smoke, leaving parents and relatives staring in forlorn disbelief at their departing offspring and wondering where or when they would be reunited.

  Hugo kissed Ellie, long and tenderly, while Nanny looked away. And then he kissed her again. Afterwards, he removed his spectacles and polished them on the end of his tie while they lapsed into silence.

  ‘Where shall I write?’ Ellie finally asked. ‘London I guess.’

  ‘Write to Eaton Square, and write often,’ Hugo replied, holding his glasses up to the light. ‘But if it’s urgent, if there’s an emergency, use that number I gave you.’

  ‘Whose number is it?’ Hugo had given her an address and a number in Whitehall.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Ell,’ he said. ‘It’ll reach me, that’s all.’

  Ellie pulled on her gloves, and buttoned them carefully, ‘I take it what you’re doing is dangerous,’ she said, ‘otherwise, knowing you, you wouldn’t be doing it.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Hugo. ‘It’s just something that’s got to be done. Anyway, if what everyone is saying is true, that it won’t last much beyond the New Year, then I might not have to do whatever it is I might have to do.’ He put his glasses back on and smiled at her.

  Ellie put her hands to his cheeks and kissed him again. ‘I love you, Hugo,’ she told him in a low voice. ‘I always have. From the moment I first saw you come up the drive at Strand House I’ve loved you, and I shall love you until the day I die.’

  ‘And I love you too, Ellie,’ Hugo told her, and then whispered, ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet. So tread softly.’

  ‘I shall,’ Ellie held his hand tightly to her. ‘I shall.’

  The porter had found her a window seat and put the luggage in the guard’s van. Following Ellie’s instructions, Nanny sat with her back to the engine and settled the still sleeping baby into the carrycot beside her. Ellie stood at the window of the carriage and made small talk to Hugo, who kept looking anxiously down the platform to the front of the train in case it should draw out early. In Ellie’s compartment was a four-year-old boy who was being evacuated, it seemed, to America, but the reality was lost on him as he kept urging his father who had come to see him off, and who was hovering in the corridor till the las
t possible moment, to come and sit down beside him. The train was crowded, even in the first class carriages, and as Ellie stood at the window a seemingly endless line of soldiers and sailors kept squeezing past her.

  And then came the sound they had all been dreading, the sharp blast on the railway guard’s whistle and the final slamming shut of the doors. The train grunted and moved backwards before it started to go forwards, throwing Ellie off her balance so she had to grab the brass top of the lowered window. In doing so, for a moment she lost hold of Hugo’s hand, and then of Hugo himself as he suddenly became engulfed by a throng of parents and friends and relatives and sweethearts who had all come to wish their children and friends and husbands and lovers goodbye.

  Ellie, grasping the window tightly, leaned out as far as she dared, and suddenly Hugo emerged from the crowd most of which was now moving to keep up with the train. He thew his hand out and Ellie just managed to catch hold of it briefly, for a moment, before the train gave another jerk as it gathered speed, and severed their connection.

  She wanted to call to him, to shout out a final affirmation of her love, but he was going, he was becoming just a face in the crowd, another hand waving.

  ‘Hugo!’ she shouted. ‘Hugo!’

  But he couldn’t hear her. He saw her wave and he saw that she was calling, but he couldn’t hear what. Running still, thrusting his way through the crowd of people, some calling their farewells, while others slowed down to a walk and just gazed in stupefaction, Hugo suddenly burst clear of the field only to find he was running out of platform. He got to her just in time, before the platform became a ramp, and then gravel and then rails. She had one kid gloved hand to her mouth.

  ‘I love you, Ellie!’ he shouted. ‘It won’t be long!’

  She was about to shout something back, when the wind suddenly whipped her hat from her head, tossing it up in the smoke filled air and out on to the tracks. And then she was gone, hidden in a thick puff of white as the train gathered speed past an incoming train. And when the smoke cleared the departing train had snaked round a bend, taking Ellie from his view.

  But at his feet, down the ramp, in the gravel, by the lines which were taking her away, lay her hat, a little dark-blue hat, a Paris hat, with a tiny veil on the front and a small red feather on the back.

  Ellie pushed the window back up and squeezing past a couple of soldiers who were standing smoking in the corridor, returned to her compartment. Her heart was breaking, but so too was the little boy’s, now unhappily abandoned by his father and sitting in the seat next to Ellie’s while the tears ran down his face. Ellie at once began to try and comfort him, as at that moment his need seemed even greater than her own.

  ‘Where’s your hat, Mrs Tanner?’ Nanny asked, and Ellie put her hand involuntarily to her head. She hadn’t even noticed it had gone. As she had gone now from Hugo, who stood alone at the end of the slowly emptying platform, staring down the line, turning the brim of her little blue hat round through his fingers.

  There was no band on the quayside this time, and there were no streamers. There was just a sense of desolation and melancholy on board as the liner was tugged slowly out into the Channel from the barrage-ballooned port.

  ‘Do you reckon those things do any good?’ a stout middle-aged American woman asked Ellie as they stood watching the coast line of England recede.

  ‘My husband says they’re rather like the gas masks,’ Ellie replied. ‘Rather than necessarily being any good, what they do is show we’re good and ready.’

  ‘I notice you say “we”,’ the woman replied. ‘You think Roosevelt’s going to drag us into this one, too?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Ellie. ‘It’s not just Hitler we’re fighting, you know.’

  ‘Come now,’ said Ellie’s fellow countrywoman. ‘Germany’s not going to pose Uncle Sam any problems. And besides, all the British seem to want is to make peace with Adolf, not war.’

  ‘You’ve heard what the Germans are doing to the Jews, surely?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘Sure I have,’ the woman replied. ‘And what did we Americans do? At least we withdrew our man from Berlin in protest. And what did the British do?’ She laughed. ‘They signed an agreement with Hitler!’

  Ellie could see the woman’s point. The British government’s obsession with appeasement had lost them a lot of points in America, as her brother Patsy had pointed out in his occasional letters to her. And although most Americans hoped Britain would defeat Germany, the country’s cause was not a popular one.

  ‘I think those things are kind of cute,’ Ellie’s neighbour said, switching subjects, as the barrage balloons caught the last of the day’s sunlight. ‘They’re like great big fish up there, wouldn’t you say? Like giant shiny silvery fish. It’s as if England’s giving a great big party.’

  ‘I say!’ one small boy said to another as they passed behind Ellie. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we were torpedoed!’

  They were not torpedoed. But there was a scare, for at one point after two days at sea the ship suddenly started zig-zagging at top speed.

  ‘Steward?’ an American gentleman called as he noticed the change in the ship’s navigation. ‘What exactly’s going on here? What is it? A submarine?’

  ‘No, sir,’ the steward answered calmly, collecting any empty glasses. ‘Just a beam sea.’

  But his reassurance fell on deaf ears as the ship’s tacking manoeuvres became more desperate, and the passengers in the lounge where Ellie was sitting reading lapsed into an ominous silence.

  ‘To hell with this!’ the gentleman passenger finally protested. ‘This is an outrage! We’re flying the Stars and Stripes! And not only that – this is a passenger liner!’

  ‘So was the Athenia,’ another voice reminded them all of the passenger boat which had been torpedoed only the day after the outbreak of hostilities. ‘And she’s rusting up nicely on the bottom somewhere off Ireland now.’

  Strangely, Ellie felt no fear. It suddenly seemed pointless to be afraid, because now there was danger everywhere and for everybody. She felt desperately sad she was no longer home and with Hugo, and she felt fear lest anything should happen to James. But for herself, she felt no terror. While the ship fled from the unseen danger beneath it, Ellie simply put down the book she was reading and prayed.

  After a seemingly endless three hours, the ship slowed its speed and began once more to sail in a straight line, head-on into seas which were fast becoming much rougher. Ellie retired to her cabin, not because she felt sick, but because it seemed everyone else was starting to do so. By evening they were in the throes of a force-eight gale, which lasted until they sailed into the shelter of the American coast two and a half days later.

  As Ellie was setting foot back on her homeland, Hugo was leaving his by plane for North Africa, in the company of two of General Hunter’s personal staff and two of General Wavell’s. They were to land first at Gibraltar, and then on to Cairo, where they would learn the purpose of their visit.

  One of General Hunter’s officers, a Major Timothy Curling, sat next to Hugo on the flight out.

  ‘You just along for the ride?’ he enquired, offering Hugo a cigarette which was declined.

  ‘More or less,’ said Hugo.

  ‘What are you, old chap? A boffin?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  The young officer frowned. ‘Must have some sort of claim to fame,’ he said.

  ‘Sand,’ said Hugo. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Sand?’ Curling’s frown deepened even more. ‘As in castles, you mean?’

  ‘As in deserts,’ Hugo replied. ‘My father was an expert, but unfortunately he’s dead and I got custody of the knowledge.’

  ‘Yes,’ Curling said. ‘Could well come in handy. If, as the top brass seem to imagine, Mussolini brings Italy into the war. Could well come in handy.’

  ‘So I imagine,’ Hugo replied. ‘Hence my free weekend in Egypt.’

  Tim Curling smiled and drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘Personally speaking,
old chap,’ he said, ‘the only sand I reckon we’ll all be seeing is the stuff we’ll all being lying out on quite peacefully next summer along the dear old South Coast.’

  Artemis was living with Diana Lanchester in her large Bayswater flat. Not that she had a great deal of time to do much living since it seemed she spent her every waking hour driving important members of the government from the House to meetings in Whitehall and back again to the House. And she had little time off, because although most people seemed to believe that the war on land was at an impasse, and that peace was just around the corner, there was constant activity in Whitehall, what with meetings between the top brass and the government leaders, and the prime minister and his cabinet ministers.

  Although the public was already being warned that careless talk could cost lives, the perpetrators of the propaganda seemed to consider themselves immune, and talked quite freely in front of Artemis when she was driving them to and fro as if she was not there.

  Many ministers expressed the concern that Chamberlain was not interested in fighting Germany at all, but was really only anxious to have a crack at Russia, since he and many like him considered that Communism posed a far greater threat to world peace than Fascism. Others, returning after meetings with the military, talked with astonishment at the unreality of High Command’s proposed offensives at Germany, which, with the absurdly limited resources the Allied governments had at their disposal, they had no possibility whatsoever of achieving. From her seat up front, Artemis heard of plans for striking at the Ruhr through Belgium, or attacking Germany’s rear flank through Scandinavia, or her remote eastern flank from Greece and the Balkans, or even for attacking Russia’s great oilfields in the Caucasus, and thus cutting off the Germans’ only supply of petrol.

  ‘Pipe dreams,’ one of Artemis’s passengers once remarked with some feeling. ‘Collective fantasies. These people are living in a dream world.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ said his companion. ‘We should be thinking how to best defend this island against what’s now got to be certain attack. Instead of talking all this well-off nonsense.’