Three more days dragged by, then Hugo was back from Suffolk.
They met in the woods. Hugo was waiting for her at the water fountain. Burnished by the sun, his teeth gleaming white in his tanned face as he smiled at the sight of Libby hurrying towards him. In deference to the heat, maybe because he was still in a holiday mood, Hugo was wearing a light-coloured blazer and no tie. Half a world away from the man she’d met in January.
‘You look very exotic, as if you should be strolling along a riviera on the Continent,’ Libby told him as she reached his side.
‘And you look positively beautiful,’ he said. ‘But then you always do.’
She tucked her arm in his and they began to walk, taking their preferred path opposite the fountain. The trees were denser, the ground more roughly hewn so one could believe that you really were in a forest, miles away from town. Even the squirrels were more plentiful along this secluded stretch.
There was a bench halfway along the path and Libby pulled Hugo down next to her. ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me then?’ she asked, because it had been over a month since they’d last seen each other.
‘Let me look at you first.’ He took her chin so he could tip her face towards the sunlight that slanted in through a gap in the leaves. ‘Yes, everything seems quite present and correct, though you are looking a little thinner. I shall have to fatten you up, my darling.’
She’d be fat enough soon. Was even looking forward to feeling her waistbands pinch and waddling about like an elephant. Libby smiled and Hugo smiled too, though he couldn’t know the joke, then he kissed her.
It was a gentle, unhurried kiss. Not quite as passionate as other kisses of his, especially when he’d been away so long. Libby made a small sound of protest, leaned further into him, opened her mouth under his and for one, quicksilver moment she felt the dart of his tongue against hers, but then Hugo pulled his mouth away, hands on her shoulders, as if to ward her off.
‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Back at the flat… you still haven’t said if you want me to buy it.’ He was looking so grave again. ‘Because I did say I would take care of you…’
She couldn’t contain the words any longer. ‘Us. There’s an us to take care of now. I’m having your child.’ Libby hadn’t meant to announce it in such a clumsy way but she wanted to shout the words at the top of her voice. But then her throat seemed to close up and she could hardly look at Hugo.
He took her chin again, raised her face so she had to look him in the eyes, which had never seemed so blue before, as if Libby might drown if she gazed into them for too long. ‘Really? Are you sure?’ he asked hoarsely.
Libby nodded and that queer feeling of wanting to laugh and cry all at once was upon her again. ‘I’m absolutely sure. I can’t believe it myself. Please say you’re happy about the news, darling.’
He curved the palm of his hand to fit her cheek as if Libby were something to be revered. ‘After what you told me had happened in Paris, well, I assumed…’
‘So did I. Thought it was hopeless and now I’m so full of hope that I’m quite mad with it.’ Libby took hold of his hand and placed it on her belly, which she was sure had a more pronounced curve to it. ‘It will be perfect. We’ll be together and there’ll be a baby too. You are pleased, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t even have the words for how I feel. Pleased, happy, they hardly come close,’ Hugo said and finally he smiled. His smile reeled her in, wrapped itself around her as surely as his tightest embrace, made her feel so loved, so wanted, so needed. ‘I’m ecstatic, Libby. Delirious. Quite, quite transported and if you weren’t enceinte, I’d pick you up and twirl you in my arms.’ He grew concerned. ‘You are well though? You look well.’
‘Positively blooming,’ she assured him, as his fingers stayed warm and splayed on her belly. ‘I felt rotten while you were away, but I’m fine now. A little dizzy if I stand up too quickly but the doctor says that’s because I have a touch of anaemia. Back on the milk stout and liver, I’m afraid.’
‘I’ll buy you steak every day,’ Hugo promised and it was so different to how Freddy had behaved when Libby had told him she was carrying his child.
They’d been in a dark, dingy pub in Soho with his dark, dingy friends. The fug of beer and tobacco had made Libby bilious and she’d dragged an unwilling Freddy outside. He’d lit a cigarette as she’d told him the news.
‘Well, that’s that,’ he’d said flatly and taken a long drag on his cigarette. ‘It is mine, then?’
‘Of course, it’s yours,’ Libby had said, stung, and as an afterthought she’d slapped him round the face in a half-hearted fashion – it seemed the right thing to do – then she’d flounced away and Freddy had sighed and come after her.
Perhaps the baby had known it wasn’t truly wanted, not by its father, and Libby’s love, her devotion, hadn’t been enough to keep it safe.
‘Darling Libby, you’ve given me more than I ever dared to dream,’ Hugo was saying. She tore herself away from the unhappy memories to where he was sitting next to her, his body angled towards her, her hands in his. ‘Let’s go back to the flat now. And I’ll call the agent first thing in the morning.’
Libby didn’t want to be ungrateful when Hugo was offering her all of himself, but now it was her turn to pull away. ‘Not the flat,’ she said haltingly. ‘I don’t want to start our new life, be a family, where something so illicit happened. That our first kiss, our first moments of being truly together, were witnessed by a detective. Please say you understand.’
Hugo kissed her again, but it felt as if her words had punctured the joy that had surrounded them. He said that he’d see her as far as the heath and neither of them even looked across the street at the mansion block as they left the woods.
They crossed over Archway Road, then the road that curved behind it, full of houses being built. Over the last few months as she’d walked to meet Hugo, Libby had always checked on their progress. She could see now that the houses were mostly complete, their scaffolding and canvas draperies all but gone.
‘What about these?’ Hugo asked, as he saw Libby glance down the street.
‘What about them? They look nice, I suppose,’ Libby replied. ‘Awfully smart.’
‘Let’s have a proper look,’ Hugo suggested and he steered her down the street where the houses had all been built to look like miniature Tudor or Georgian mansions.
‘How odd,’ she said to Hugo. ‘Why would you want to live in a new house that looks like an old house?’
‘Not this one.’ They were standing outside a house still obscured by scaffolding but even so Libby could tell from the sleek lines, the gleaming white of the frontage, that it had been designed to look as if it were built in the last ten years, not during the reign of Elizabeth I. ‘This one looks more modern, don’t you think?’
‘Coincidentally, the style is called The Moderne,’ said a youngish man, in trousers and shirtsleeves, his face ruddy from recent exertions, who’d just emerged from the house and was walking down the path towards them. ‘With an e on the end, in the French style. For the potential homeowner with a more discerning eye.’
Libby turned to hide her smile at his salesman patter. ‘It’s for sale then?’ Hugo asked.
‘Last one. All the others have been snapped up. I’m Gordon Shaw, master builder.’ He and Hugo shook hands. ‘Welcome to Elysian Place. Don’t know if you’re cognizant of your Greek mythology but Elysian pertains to all matters heavenly.’ The man spread his arms wide. ‘And who wouldn’t want a small piece of Paradise in leafy Highgate to call their own?’
‘We would.’ Hugo turned to Libby. ‘Wouldn’t we?’
‘A whole house? Have you gone quite mad?’
Hugo grinned. ‘Well, what use would half a house be?’
Gordon Shaw, master builder, was very agreeable to letting them have a look around the house. It was finished enough that Libby could see the stained-glass panels in the front door and the window in the stairwell adorned with sunbeams, so one might always feel lifted and cheery when one glanced at them. The rooms were bright and cheery too and it would have electricity, and hot water simply by lighting the geyser in the kitchen. There was a scullery with a sink in it and a pantry and if Libby had been asked to design her dream home, it would look a lot like this one.
‘You could have radiators in every room.’ Hugo came up behind Libby so he could close his arms around her waist again as she stood in the kitchen gazing out of the window at the garden that was just topsoil though Mr Shaw had promised it would be laid to grass and fruit trees planted. ‘Shaw says they can put a shower in the bathroom too. I’ll give you every modern convenience you could possibly want.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Hugo! A house! You can’t buy a house as casually as if you were buying a pair of socks or a new tie. I don’t need to be spoiled like this. It would make no difference to me if you were poor.’ Libby laughed nervously because even though she loved Hugo, she wasn’t sure what she’d done to deserve all this love. Certainly no one else that she’d loved so doggedly, so desperately, had loved her back even half as much. Only her own flesh and blood – father, mother, sister – and all that love had died with them. It seemed to Libby that she’d been searching for its replacement ever since.
‘Not spoiled. Cherished,’ Hugo said, guiding her down the hall and into the front room. The lounge, he called it. ‘Shall we get rid of the nasty old-fashioned fireplace?’
The fireplace was simple and elegant, the outer tiles and the ashpan a lovely duck-egg blue, the inner tiles and the edging a darker French navy.
‘Even with radiators, there’s something so lovely and cosy about a fire on a winter’s night,’ Libby decided. She looked around the room. It was all clean lines, no nooks and crannies and queer little angles where shadows could lurk. The house would hardly need any cleaning at all. Just a char to come in twice a week. ‘Everything here is perfect. I’d hardly change a thing.’
They walked through hand in hand, peering around doors, exclaiming at each new discovery. Libby didn’t want Hugo to think that she was a horrid little gold-digger but she couldn’t help but get caught up in the madness of it all.
‘This could be the nursery,’ she said when they came to the last unexplored room upstairs, with its view of the garden where the baby would lie in its pram on sunny days, fat fists curled, as it watched the leaves dance on the trees, the clouds roll by.
‘I never even asked how far along you are,’ Hugo said and she noticed that already he looked at her differently; almost as if he were slightly scared of her. Before he’d gone away, he’d always looked at Libby hungrily, as if he couldn’t wait to make her naked.
‘Three months, the doctor said.’ Libby found that she was blushing. ‘I think it must have been the first time that we… we were together.’
She’d often wondered, before she’d become pregnant the first time, if there were something wrong with her. She hadn’t lived chastely, but she was one of the few women she knew who hadn’t got caught even though there had been times that she’d been careless; had been too poor to bother with Volpar gels and too drunk to douche with vinegar after. So many girls she’d known had had to marry in haste or disappear to stay with distant relatives only to return a little diminished, a little less than they once had been. Or there was always Mickey Flynn who, for a small fee, would affect an introduction to a doctor with rooms in Harley Street. Or for a smaller fee, would put a girl in touch with a doctor who worked out of a cheap hotel in Marble Arch.
It had never been anything that Libby had to worry about until she was thirty-one and positively ancient. And now, at thirty-two, when she’d been told that her dancing days were over, here she was about to take to the floor again.
‘Well, it was a memorable night,’ Hugo said with a wolfish smile that was so out of character that it made Libby laugh. ‘So, February, then. Six months from now.’ His expression grew serious once more. ‘Even if we’ve gone to court, the divorce won’t be final by then. The child will be born a b —’
‘Don’t say it!’ Libby covered his lips with her hand. ‘I’m so happy, don’t ruin it, because the dates, this legal nonsense, they’re simply not important.’
‘I’m not even sure I’ll be able to put my name on the birth certificate.’ Hugo moved away from Libby to lean against the window sill. ‘If the divorce isn’t final, if I’m meant to have no contact with you for six months.’
‘I don’t see how it counts. It’s the contact you had with me which led to the divorce in the first place.’ Libby was bored with talking about it. It was the dullest subject on earth. ‘I’ve already told you I don’t care. You don’t have to buy a house, you really don’t, because wherever we live, even if it’s a mud hut, we’ll be happy, we’ll be a family. I’ll call myself Mrs Watkins and no one need be any the wiser.’
Hugo ran a hand through his hair, though it took more than that for it to fall into disarray. ‘It’s not how things should be. I don’t suppose you’ve heard from your erstwhile husband?’
The situation in Spain had escalated at a quite frightening pace. The Nationalists were on their way to Madrid. Libby was sure that Freddy, allied as he was to the Republican cause, was having far too much fun to think about writing to her, much less coming back to London so he could denounce her as an adulteress in front of a packed court. ‘Not so much as a postcard,’ she said and Hugo cursed under his breath, his eyes no longer dark and full of promise, but squinty and cold. ‘I swear to God, if you say one more word about any of this, I will scream. If you don’t want me, don’t want the baby, you only have to say. We’ll manage, just the two of us,’ Libby said hotly, then she couldn’t say any more because Hugo had stood up and he was kissing her quite desperately.
As if he loved her more than anything.