Libby had just reached the top of Muswell Hill Road when Hugo drove up. He pulled over and she waited for him to park and get out of his sleek black car.
Libby had anticipated his shocked look when he caught sight of what she was wearing; Freddy’s grey flannel trousers and shabby tweed coat, a pair of sturdy lace-ups and her green felt cloche, which had seen much better days. She had put on lipstick, a vibrant red, but she still didn’t look like the sort of woman who stole other women’s husbands, which she was rather glad about.
Still, Hugo said nothing apart from a muttered hello and an aside about the weather, which was cold and as wet as one would expect from an afternoon in early April. Libby had worried that the woods would be muddy, but once they slipped through the gate, she was relieved to find that there were proper paths, the trees held at bay but a lovely earthy smell to the air. They started to walk and though Hugo had said that evening in the Flask that Libby would need to tuck her arm in his, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She rather fancied that if she did, Hugo’s arm would snap in two. He was so tense.
They walked on, turning left to pass a drinking fountain where two little girls in matching navy blue coats were more concerned with splashing each other, much to the dismay of the woman they were with. Too young to be their mother, possibly their nanny or governess, for she took hold of an arm apiece and said crossly, ‘I’ll tell Cook that you’re not to have any pudding if you insist on behaving like street urchins.’
Libby smiled and expected Hugo to smile too but he stared ahead as if he were willing himself somewhere far, far away.
‘You said you had children, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’ The word was dragged out of him.
He really would be so much more attractive if he weren’t so pompous, Libby thought, noting again his exquisitely honed profile, the greying hair at his temples and sideburns – though that never mattered much if you were a man. If you were a woman though, it was the end of the world.
‘We can walk around this wood in silence if you’d prefer, but we’re hardly likely to be having a torrid affair if we can’t even have a conversation,’ Libby gently scolded. ‘You were much more talkative in the Flask.’ Inspiration struck. ‘Would you like to find a pub? I think there’s one by the little railway station.’
Hugo shook his head. ‘No pub. Two children. The girl’s seventeen. She’s in Switzerland being finished at considerable expense and the boy’s nineteen. He’s up at Oxford, reading History.’
The girl. The boy. If Libby had the baby, he’d be a month old by now, and she would call him by his name, call him precious and sweet. ‘Do you love them, your children?’
‘Of course I do!’ Hugo came to a halt and Libby had wanted him less stuffy, more animated but she didn’t care for the flash of anger that sharpened his features. ‘What a ridiculous question.’
Libby stood her ground. ‘If you love them, then you should call them by their names.’
He gave her the oddest look, as if she had surprised him. As if he were surprised by his surprise. ‘Robin and Susan,’ he said eventually. ‘Robin is a good sort, fearless, funny, knocks around with quite a fast crowd at Oxford.’ Hugo frowned as if fast crowds weren’t something he approved of. ‘Spends far too much time at Sywell Aerodrome when he should be studying. But he’s grown up around cars, always been fascinated by engines. When he was little, he used to beg to come to the garage and would get in everyone’s way, pester us with questions until we put him to work. He’s never been afraid to get stuck in.’
Hugo relaxed as he talked and Libby decided that it would be all right if she tucked her arm into his. He looked down to where they were joined, frowned again but kept on walking. ‘And Susan?’
‘Susan. Well, she’s a regular chatterbox. Can talk and talk about everything from Clark Gable to the Romantic poets. She thinks Byron is absolutely splendid and wishes he were alive today. Plays the ocarina… very badly.’ He grimaced as if the memory of Susan’s ocarina-playing haunted him. ‘I didn’t want to pack her off to finishing school but Pam – her mother – insisted. I refused to send her to Germany like most of her friends so she’s in Switzerland, Lausanne.’
‘Because of Hitler? Is that why you don’t want her to go to Germany?’ Libby asked, because when they’d been in the pub and he’d teased her about Bolsheviks, it had been hard to fathom where his political allegiances might lie.
‘People tell me that he’s done wonders for Germany, united the nation, made it a model of efficiency, and that rather worries me. We all know what happened last time the Germans got ideas above their station. Besides, I’d rather my daughter wasn’t in Berlin or Munich dancing with boys whose fathers may well have killed her uncles.’
‘You lost your brothers?’
Hugo nodded and Libby felt a little pang of something tender towards him. Countless people, starting with her aunt Dolly and ending with Freddy, had told Libby that it did her no good to be so soft, that she couldn’t suffer for everyone, but she didn’t know any other way. ‘My father died at Amiens,’ she said. It was so long ago now that it didn’t hurt.
‘So many good men lost. I know that I was one of the lucky few. I was called up in nineteen sixteen, married Pamela before I went. Everyone said we were too young,’ Hugo said so quietly that Libby had to strain to catch each word. ‘Still, I thought we were happy enough. Evidently not.’ He said something else, but it was lost to the wind, the rustling of leaves, the quick brush of a squirrel darting through the undergrowth.
‘I’m sorry,’ Libby said, expecting him to repeat his words, but Hugo simply nodded as if he were accepting her condolences.
‘I’ll see you next week, then,’ he said and Libby realised that they’d done a complete loop of the woods and were back where they started.
Maybe not exactly where they’d started. They’d forged a truce, perhaps even the start of a fragile, flimsy friendship, despite their footsteps being dogged by a thickset, ruddy-faced man in a gabardine coat who hadn’t even attempted to be discreet. And when Libby leaned forward and kissed Hugo’s cold cheek, she saw the man raise a small box camera and take their picture.
The next week, Libby knew what to expect. From Hugo’s mild discomfort, which lasted for the time it took them to reach the second set of gates that led back to Muswell Hill Road, to the private detective lumbering behind them, his heavy breaths and steps puncturing the silence.
‘Mickey said that you were well travelled,’ Hugo said at last as Libby had been desperately trying to think of something to talk about. ‘That you’d been to California and New York and were in Paris last year. I found myself in Paris at the end of the war, I didn’t think much of it.’
‘Really?’ Libby turned to him in surprise. ‘I used to love Paris.’ She didn’t love Paris any more. Vowed that she’d never set foot anywhere near it ever again. ‘Every other person you meet is an artist or a poet and the place may be old and decaying but in such a pretty way. London isn’t at all pretty, is it?’
Hugo gestured at the trees. ‘Oh, parts of it have a certain charm.’
‘But it’s not charming,’ Libby persisted. ‘Though Paris would be a lot more charming if the men didn’t piss in the streets.’
Libby thought that people only ever spluttered in outrage in novels but Hugo was now beyond words, only capable of huffing.
‘Isn’t my language appalling?’ She laughed nervously. ‘You’d never think I grew up in a good Catholic home but I went into the theatre at the age of fourteen and I’m afraid it had a detrimental effect on my vocabulary… and my soul.’
‘How does a good Catholic girl end up in the theatre at such a tender age?’ Hugo asked.
So Libby told him about her happy childhood. Loving father, kind mother, adored younger sister. How the days had a steady, safe rhythm that was torn apart by the war and as Libby was still reeling from the black-edged telegram, which meant she’d never see her father again, she’d lost her mother and Charlotte to the flu epidemic.
Her father had been an only child and on her mother’s side there’d only been Dolly, her mother’s flighty younger sister, who’d eventually been tracked down to a touring theatre company where she was employed as a dresser.
‘They’d take a play that was doing very well in London then perform it very badly in the provinces,’ Libby told Hugo brightly. He laughed as she’d intended, though at the time none of it had been funny. To leave the house she’d always lived in, only allowed to pack as much as would fit in a suitcase because Aunt Dolly said that she preferred to travel light.
She’d also have preferred to travel without her niece in tow. ‘We’ll just have to make the best of it,’ Dolly had said frequently and unenthusiastically.
Dolly had looked enough like Libby’s mother that it was comforting but also a cruel injustice. The same russet-coloured hair and green eyes, but her mother’s face had been prettier, sweeter, her smile soft. Dolly always looked faintly exasperated, as if she’d walked to the shops in the pouring rain only to find them shut.
Still, Libby had made the best of it, as instructed. Her old life consisted only of home, school, church and occasional outings to the park or the cinema.
Her new life was full of adults who didn’t behave in the way that Libby expected them to. They got drunk and swore a lot. In the dressing room, the women walked about in their unmentionables and talked about their love affairs. She learned that men could love other men, like most men loved their wives, and that it was entirely possible for a girl to get in the family way, even if she weren’t married. Then there was the male lead who would pinch Libby’s cheek and buy her cream buns but on Friday night when the cast got paid, he would become a mean, snarling drunk who would invariably black the female lead’s eyes so the understudy would have to do the Saturday matinée.
Libby didn’t even go to school because Dolly said that she’d never sat for her school certificate and it hadn’t done her any harm. Instead the company manager, Mr Wilkes, had Libby help him with the accounts and would stick her in the prompt box of an evening, so it was an education of sorts.
It was also Mr Wilkes who’d first put Libby onstage, at Dolly’s bidding because she was keen for Libby to start earning her keep.
‘I could dance a little, remember my lines and Mr Wilkes said that was a lot more than most of his company could manage,’ Libby told Hugo, who seemed gripped by the tale of her early days in the theatre. ‘Truthfully, back then I was more decorative than talented.’ She put up a hand to her hair, which still hadn’t quite returned to the vibrant red it had been before she went to Paris. ‘Now, I’m not even that.’
Hugo smiled at her. Libby thought that it might be the first smile of his that reached his eyes. ‘Oh, I think you still are. Decorative.’
Libby violently fluttered her eyelashes, which made Hugo smile reluctantly as if he didn’t want to encourage her. ‘Why thank you, kind sir.’
By now they’d completed their circuit, were back at Gypsy Gate, but Hugo held out his arm. ‘Shall we go round again? I’m interested to know how you went from touring the provinces to California.’
Anything was better than going back to Willoughby Square. Though that was rather unfair because walking and talking (mostly about herself) with Hugo was hardly an ordeal. As they set off again, Libby heard their chaperone give an aggrieved sigh.
‘Well, if you’re sure you won’t be bored listening to me prattle on about my misadventures on stage and screen.’
‘It’s not boring at all,’ Hugo said. ‘It sounds far more glamorous than my formative years, which were spent at boarding school in Shropshire.’
‘Hardly glamorous!’ Libby scoffed. ‘Not when Aunt Dolly disappeared into the Scarborough sunset with a married haulage contractor without so much as a forwarding address when I was sixteen.’ Libby had come back to London, signed with Deidre and Ronald Withers, and progressed to playing bigger roles, though she played them without that spark, that indefinable something that the really good actresses had. Ten years of auditions, rehearsals, opening nights and praying for a long run.
Then she’d been cast in a wildly successful musical revue at the Savoy Theatre, which had transferred to New York. ‘New York was absolutely wonderful. So full of life, a little gaudy too, I suppose, but we were put up in this frightfully grand hotel. There were radiators in every room and showers in the bathrooms,’ Libby remembered with a wistful sigh. ‘I swore that one day I’d live in a house with radiators in every room and a shower in the bathroom too.’
‘I can tell you now that if you achieve that lofty goal, your gas bills will be quite prohibitive,’ Hugo said in a teasing, but slightly pained manner, which made Libby think Hugo probably did live in a house with radiators in every room and a shower was an everyday occurrence. He didn’t have the careless, shabby grace that frightfully rich people did, but he carried himself with a certain assurance that only came when you didn’t have to worry about having enough coins to feed the meter. Whatever indignities may have been heaped on him by his adulterous wife he was still sure of his place in the world and Libby rather envied him for that.
It felt perfectly natural now to have her arm tucked into Hugo’s and he patted her hand in a gentle prompt to continue with her story and her ill-fated trip from New York to California, after being wooed by a movie producer, who’d seen the revue she was in.
‘California was so sunny and there were palm trees lining Sunset Boulevard,’ she said. ‘I could have stayed there for ever.’
‘The palm trees lost their lustre, I take it?’ Hugo enquired when Libby sighed at the memory.
‘Alas, it was me who lost her lustre.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ Hugo said with another of those strangely assessing looks that he excelled at, his eyes sweeping over Libby from top to bottom and lingering in the places in between in a way that no other man had done for a long while.
Certainly no man in Hollywood had looked at Libby with such keen interest. Instead, the powers that be at the studio had ordered Libby’s hairline to be shaved and her nose reshaped with thin strips of rubber hidden under thick panstick, but still, on camera, her face had been doughy and inanimate. There was a squint in her left eye, which she’d never even noticed until the cruel, unforgiving gaze of the camera homed in on it, and then there was her voice. ‘I never gave my voice any thought before,’ she explained to Hugo as they circled the cricket pitch, swerving to avoid the muddier parts of the path. ‘No director I’ve worked with seemed to find it objectionable, but on tape I had the most terrible lisp and I squeaked. And the more the soundman shouted at me, the higher pitched my voice became, until in the end I couldn’t speak at all. It was awful.’
Still dreaming of blue oceans and palm trees, of radiators and hot showers, Libby had sailed back to England, tail very firmly between her legs, sure that nothing good would ever happen to her again.
Deidre Withers had been particularly smug about Libby’s fall from grace and had nothing for Libby other than an audition for a part in a ghastly experimental play. ‘It’s Expressionist,’ Deidre had said, though Libby didn’t know what that meant.
She had to intone a series of portentous statements while performing calisthenics and wearing a horrid brown leotard and tights, but then she’d been introduced to Freddy who’d been responsible for writing the ghastly experimental play. So as one door had slammed shut in her face, another one had opened, but she wasn’t ready to tell Hugo about Freddy.
Freddy! For one whole hour while they’d been tracking through the woods, she’d hadn’t thought about him at all. Which meant she hadn’t thought about the baby either and as soon as she realised that, Libby felt the hot wash of guilt soak through her.
‘You have had some adventures. My life seems very dull by comparison,’ Hugo was saying and Libby was no longer in the draughty rehearsal room in Holborn or in that wretched, barren bed in a Parisian hospital, but back at Gypsy Gate.
‘I suppose I have,’ Libby said, though she couldn’t imagine there were any more adventures in store for her. It felt as if she’d done everything, been everywhere, and now her fate was to become like the ladies of Willoughby Square. A decrepit, unloved paying guest in someone else’s house.
‘So, same time next week?’
Libby raised her eyebrows. ‘I thought you said that we need only do this a couple of times?’
‘Once more couldn’t hurt though, could it?’ Hugo glanced behind them, where the private detective was leaning heavily against a tree and looking as if he might cry if they walked around the woods one more time. ‘Just to ensure our fat friend has everything he needs. If you can spare the time…’
‘In that case, of course.’ Libby could always do with another five pounds, and also it was so nice to talk to someone who wasn’t an elderly PG or a small girl. The other teachers never invited Libby to join in their conversations about the strapping young men who all seemed to be called Nigel or Guy, who would pick them up after school in jaunty little cars. And Libby could hardly bear to be with her old theatre friends who were living a life that wasn’t hers any more.
Libby supposed that she was lonely though she’d had this feeling of… not belonging for so many years now that she hardly gave it thought.
Even so, she hated being on her own.