In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 6

  Ellie saw the mockery in her father’s eyes, as she saw the hate. In all the eyes that were watching her, that’s all she could see. Undiluted hate.

  ‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked them, still managing to keep the tears from her eyes. ‘What have I ever done that makes you hate me like this?’

  ‘Tell her, Fergal,’ her father said tonelessly. ‘Tell her what she did that makes us feel no love for her. You tell her, boy.’

  Fergal walked slowly across to Ellie and put his face right up to her’s. ‘I’ll tell you what you did, Eleanor Milligan,’ he hissed. ‘You killed our mother.’

  ‘How could I have killed her, Madame?’

  Ellie sat in the half-light of their neighbour’s drawing room, the dark curtains pulled some of the way across the windows to keep out the sunlight. Madame Gautier did not like sunlight, as she had frequently informed her young visitor.

  ‘You should ignore what he say, chèrie,’ Madame replied. ‘He is sadiste.’

  ‘What is that, please?’

  ‘What your father is, child. Now ’ave a bon-bon.’

  Madame Gautier held the small silver tray of chocolates out for Ellie, who unable to resist, got up and helped herself to another one.

  ‘Besides,’ Madame added, when she herself had also taken a sweet, ‘it is a complete nonsense.’

  ‘What is, Madame?’

  ‘To say you killed your mother.’

  Madame rearranged her skirt as she sat back in her chair. The skirt was silk lined and made a lovely sound whenever Madame moved, which Madame still found intoxicating, even to this day, a day long after she had ‘retired’ from the theatre. Ellie also thrilled to hear it, for it sounded so glamorous, and put her in mind of some of the stories Madame had told her of her early days on the stage.

  But today Ellie’s mind was on other matters, such as what her brothers had meant by their accusation.

  ‘I just don’t understand, Madame,’ Ellie confessed, ‘I never even knew my mother.’

  ‘I shall speak to that father of yours,’ Madame sighed, raising a small glass half full of dark amber liquid to her lipsticked mouth. ‘I shall go and tell ’im what a perfect swine he is.’

  ‘Oh no, Madame,’ Ellie frowned. ‘You can’t do that. He hates me coming here. He says you give me ideas. Ideas I really shouldn’t have.’

  ‘What nonsense.’

  ‘I know. But if you went and called.’

  ‘Yes, chèrie. I know.’

  Madame put her glass down to put a cigarette in her holder. Ellie lit it for her with a match from a small silver box.

  ‘Merci, mon petit chou,’ said Madame.

  ‘I still don’t understand how I’m meant to have killed my mother,’ Ellie frowned.

  ‘You did not,’ said Madame with a faint snort. ‘’Ow could you? You were a bébé. What ’appens is women ’ave bébés and sometimes they die. This is a fact of our life! But your mother she ’ad too many bébés. She did not want to, but the church – the church say she must, and so do your father. Your mother was too fine, trés petite, comme toi. She was not like an ’orse who can ’ave bébés every year! She was so small! So fine! And I say to your father, I say you will kill ’er! I say. As if with your own ’and!’

  ‘I don’t understand?’ Ellie was becoming more and more confused.

  ‘Your mother did not need to be always enceinte, n’est ce pas? There are little what do we say? little preventions. There are these ways. And they are très necessaire, if we women are not to die like this.’

  ‘How, Madame?’ Ellie asked, still entirely baffled. ‘If women are not to die how?’

  ‘Look,’ Madame sighed hugely. ‘There is no need for anyone to die like this. And most certainly not your mother, and not you. If your father ’e ’ad listened to the nurse and called for the doctor and not for the priest – puh!’ Madame shrugged and pouted her lips. ‘But your father –’ she leaned forward and whispered at Ellie. ‘Your father did not want to pay for the doctor, while the priest ’e comes free! If ’e ’ad called the doctor then I say that no-one dies!’

  ‘So why does my father say I killed her?’

  ‘Ah bon,’ Madame said, putting out her cigarette. ‘I tell you why. If you are ’aving a bébé, and there is danger, the church say you must die, and the ’usband keep the bébé. Not ‘is wife – but the bébé! This is good for the men, yes? But not so good for the children who soudainment they ’ave no mother! And it is not at all good for the mothers who soudainment are dead! It is a rule of the church, the mother must die. And who make the rules? The men of course!’ Madame lit another cigarette and blew a long curl of blue smoke upwards from the side of her mouth.

  ‘So the church killed my mother?’ Ellie asked, cautiously.

  Madame nodded. ‘Oui,’ she said. ‘Vraiment.’

  ‘Then I shall never go to church again,’ Ellie vowed.

  Madame looked at her through a veil of smoke which she fanned away with a jewelled hand. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I think so. I think you do.’

  ‘No, Madame,’ Ellie insisted. ‘I won’t ever go to church again. Not ever.’

  ‘You will go to church, and there’s an end of it, do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Well?’

  Ellie said nothing, deciding to stare down at the polished wood floor instead.

  ‘If you do not go to church, child, you will be in the most deadly and mortal sin.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘And when you die, you will be as nothing. You will be as worthless as a piece of dirt on the sole of my shoe. You will be consigned straight to hell, where you will roast in eternal agony, never again to know any peace, and never to look upon the face of God. Is that what you really want, child?’

  ‘No, Father,’ Ellie replied, without looking up. ‘I just don’t want ever to go to church again.’

  ‘But why ever not, my child?’

  By now the priest was becoming exasperated with the child who in turn was becoming ever more stubborn by the minute. It was a boiling hot morning, he had three other appointments before lunch, and his head ached dully from the excess of Jack Daniels he had drunk the night before with the child’s father, who had been beside himself with rage when he had arrived at the Presbytery.

  ‘She shut herself in her bedroom all day, Tom!’ Pat Milligan had ranted. ‘I’ll not brook such disobedience! How dare she! I’ll not have any child of mine disobeying not only me, but turning her back on God’s own holy ordinance!’

  ‘She’s a little girl, Pat,’ the priest had tried to reassure him. ‘Sure children get all sorts of crazy ideas, all sorts of ideas so they do.’

  He had then put the bottle of whisky out on the table, in the hope that after a couple of shots, Pat Milligan’s rage would abate, and they could talk instead about the Red Sox’s chances in next week’s match against the New York Giants.

  But Pat Milligan was in no mood to be mollified. ‘You’re to come and see the child tomorrow, Tom,’ he ordered. ‘And you’re to scare the living daylights out of her, do you hear? I want her back at Mass next Sunday, and if you can’t persuade her, then this belt of mine’ll have to do the talking!’

  The priest took his handkerchief out and wiped the beads of sweat from his brow. It seemed there was nothing he could do to persuade the child to cease her disobedience, nothing he could say which would frighten her sufficiently for her to come to her senses. She just sat there, mostly in silence, staring down at the floor, with her hands clasped tightly between her knees.

  ‘You know what will happen to you, child, if you continue to disobey your father,’ he said wearily, ‘and if you continue to fly in the face of God’s will.’

  ‘Nothing that hasn’t happened before, Father,’ Ellie replied, almost as wearily, but still refusing to look up.

  ‘Why, child?’ the priest said, deciding on another approach, one of pained bewilderment. ‘You’ve always been such a good little girl. Such a
n obedient and faithful member of the flock. So I find this, well, this rebellion of yours, for that’s what it is, isn’t it? Some kind of rebellion now. It just doesn’t make any sense. Unless of course it’s something you’ve done.’ The priest leaned forward, in his best confessional manner. ‘Something you yourself have done and which you’re afraid to confess.’

  ‘No, Father,’ Ellie replied, trying to manoeuvre herself away from the smell of stale whisky and nicotine. ‘It’s nothing that I have done.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the priest. ‘Then it’s something someone has done to you, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ellie agreed.

  ‘And who might this wicked person be?’ the priest asked.

  ‘You,’ said Ellie, finally looking at him straight in his watery red eyes. ‘You and my father.’

  The priest frowned and pulled at his collar to try and gain some respite from the suffocating heat. Then he tried smiling back at the serious-faced child, for this must surely be a tease. Because he couldn’t for the life of him imagine what he personally could have done to her. That brute of a father, certainly. But himself? Never.

  ‘Come on now, child,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. What in heaven’s name has this poor old priest ever done to you, eh?’

  ‘You killed my mother,’ Ellie told him. ‘Instead of calling the doctor, my father called you, and you and the church killed her.’

  The priest frowned and sighed, and then tried reasoning with the child, but only half-heartedly, his enthusiasm for this particular subject having long gone, so often had he had to cover this ground. Finally, and seeing he was getting nowhere, overcome by an incipient lethargy induced by the excesses of the previous night and exacerbated by the heat, the priest slowly rose to his feet and picked up his hat.

  ‘Then there’s nothing more I can say to you, child,’ he sighed, wiping his sweating brow with his hand. ‘There is nothing I can do or say to save you from the wrath of God, or indeed from the wrath of your own father, poor man.’

  But for all Patrick Milligan’s wrath, and for all the constant beatings he administered to Ellie with his thick leather belt, he was unable to break her will. Ellie never returned to her parish church. Even when her father beat Patsy for no reason other than to force his daughter to change her mind, Ellie stood firm, as privately Patsy had made her swear to do.

  ‘It’s no good, Father,’ Ellie had said. ‘You can beat me till I die, I don’t care. Because I would rather die than ever again go to church.’

  Finally her father stopped belting her every weekend. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘but just remember what you are. You are doomed. You and your brother. You both are doomed to the bottomless pits of hell. You’re no longer worthy, either of you, of the sight of God.’

  Ellie listened, but said nothing, thinking that if indeed there was a God, and if he was anything like her father, then hell and its bottomless pits would be infinitely preferable to so-called heaven.

  ‘You really should be riding a horse,’ Artemis’s stepmother said to her one morning as they waited for the hounds to move off. ‘You’re getting far too tall for that pony.’

  Artemis knew this to be true, but was more than a little reluctant to part with Paintbox. Bought as a second pony after she had grown out of Buttons, he had proved himself such a marvellous jumper and such a resolute galloper, Artemis couldn’t possibly imagine life without him.

  ‘Oh, I know what you’re thinking, Artemis,’ her stepmother continued. ‘I was just the same at your age. You couldn’t possibly part with him, there’ll never be another animal like him, and when your pony goes, there goes your childhood. Well that’s true, up to a point, but these things have to be faced. And the point is you’ve suddenly grown rather tall and stringy, and as a consequence you look quite ridiculous on that thing.’

  ‘Paintbox can still carry me all day,’ Artemis replied. ‘He’s terribly strong.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Artemis,’ her stepmother said. ‘It’s time you moved on to horses. I shall have a word with your father about it. I know he’ll agree. He thinks you’ve become quite the little horsewoman.’

  The hounds moved off and her stepmother followed, leaving Artemis to consider her father’s compliment. It was the first he had ever paid her. Normally when she had gone well, it had been her horse which had received the praise. ‘Pony went well today,’ he might say as they dismounted. ‘Certainly jumps.’ Or after a fast thing, ‘That pony certainly keeps you out of trouble, yes? Certainly knows a thing or two, that chap.’ But nothing was ever said to the rider.

  And yet now, it seemed, he considered her to be a horsewoman. Artemis was completely bewildered. For her stepmother to tell her meant that she and her father must sometimes talk about her, and that her father had undoubtedly on at least one occasion said that he thought Artemis had some ability. And if that was the case, then the idea for Artemis to move up to a horse must surely have sprung from him. Because her stepmother would never have made such a suggestion. Normally all she did was belittle Artemis’s riding skills whenever she could.

  As she moved off with the other mounted followers, Artemis determined that if her father thought it was time for her to stop riding ponies and learn to hunt on a horse, then so be it. She would make the transition.

  ‘Isn’t he a little tall?’ Artemis asked, as she stood admiring her fifteenth birthday present, a stunning looking dark brown thoroughbred gelding which Jenkins had been instructed to lead up outside the house as a surprise. Artemis wasn’t afraid of riding tall horses, only anxious in case she might still be too short in the leg to get the best out of them. ‘He must be at least sixteen hands.’

  ‘He is sixteen hands exactly,’ her stepmother informed her. ‘And you won’t be over-horsed, not since you are going to ride him side-saddle.’

  ‘But –’ Artemis started, appalled at the notion of not being able to ride such a racey looking creature astride.

  ‘No buts, Artemis. It’s your father’s idea, not mine.’ And then the second Lady Deverill turned to Artemis and smiled a small, closed smile. ‘I think,’ she added, ‘that your father wants to be as proud of you as he was of your moth-er. So. Happy birthday, my sweet. And as an extra treat, Annellie Clyde is coming to stay for a week to teach you the rudiments.’

  And that was that. Artemis’s father was away for a week’s sport in Leicestershire, and apparently it was expected of Artemis that she should be ready and able to go out and ride her new horse side-saddle alongside her father on his return.

  Fortunately Annellie Clyde was an inspired teacher and Artemis, besides being a very talented rider was also an extremely quick learner, so much so that the principles of riding side-saddle were learned by the end of day two, although without the help of Artemis’s new horse, Hullabaloo, who had proved himself to be somewhat too fidgety and edgy to be included in the preliminary tuition. But by the morning of the fifth day, rider and horse became a team, and by that afternoon Artemis and her teacher went for a stiff ten-mile hack. On the morning of the sixth day, Hullabaloo and Artemis jumped a line of good hedges in perfect harmony, and by the end of the first week Annellie Clyde considered her pupil ready for her first full day out.

  ‘Whose mad fool idea was this anyway?’ Diana Lanchester demanded of her godchild when she saw her mounted on her new horse. ‘It would be hardly sensible on a quiet day, but you know how they run here.’

  The hunt was met at Parks’ Lodge from where, at this time of year provided the scent was good, it was inevitably a red letter day.

  ‘It’s all right, Godmother,’ Artemis assured her, doing her best to stop Hullabaloo from fidgeting. ‘We’ll keep at the back.’

  ‘Keep at the back?’ her godmother snorted in disbelief. ‘On that thing? He looks as if he’s about to come under starter’s orders at Epsom! You’ll get off, if you’ve any sense!’

  ‘But he’s lovely, Godmother!’ Artemis protested. ‘And he’s got the most amazing jump!’

&
nbsp; At that moment Hullabaloo suddenly spun and lashed out, nearly catching the horse behind. Artemis sat him well, and quickly brought him back under control.

  ‘Has he seen hounds?’ Diana Lanchester demanded. ‘He doesn’t look as if he’s ever seen hounds before! Where in heaven’s name did you get him?’

  ‘My father bought him for me,’ Artemis replied. ‘For my birthday.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ her godmother called, as Hullabaloo began to spin again. ‘Your father would never be such a damn fool!’

  ‘He did, Godmother!’ Artemis called after her, ‘I promise!’ But her godmother was gone, making her way through the throng of horses to Lord Deverill’s side.

  Artemis reined her horse back again, but he was becoming more and more strung-up and excited by the minute.

  ‘You do look a picture,’ said a voice behind her. ‘Someone said they thought for a moment you were your mother.’ The second Lady Deverill, also riding side-saddle and turned out in a quite immaculate habit, pulled up alongside Artemis on a bay Artemis hadn’t seen before.

  ‘I wish they’d move off,’ Artemis confessed, ‘before Hullabaloo causes a real hullabaloo.’

  ‘He looks frightfully well,’ said her stepmother. ‘You really do both look quite the thing.’ Then she suddenly dropped her voice and leant slightly forward. ‘Your Papa will be terr-ibly pleased.’

  But Artemis was hardly attending. She was too busy watching her godmother, who had reached her father’s side and was having an animated conversation with him, albeit a somewhat one-sided one. Artemis saw her father turn right round in his saddle and stare back to where she was, while her godmother was still haranguing him. Then, just as Diana Lanchester detached herself and began heading back in Artemis’s direction, one of the huntsmen blew for hounds to move off, and the day began.

  Diana Lanchester didn’t catch up with Artemis and her stepmother until Lord Deverill and his huntsmen cast their hounds into a field of kale for the first draw.

  ‘Beautiful morning,’ the second Lady Deverill said. ‘Perfect scenting weather.’