As soon as Libby was back from Paris, Hugo had to go away. To Manchester, he said, where he was going into business, opening a car showroom, with an old army pal.
They met in Highgate Woods on a Sunday morning, at their bench, their secret little place. Summer had lingered a little but now it was dead and gone and Hugo was back in his drab dark clothes but still smiled when he saw Libby. Then his smile died too and his face lost all its warmth.
‘You were gone over a fortnight, Libby,’ he said harshly as soon as she was in earshot. ‘I didn’t know what had happened to you.’
Libby took a deep breath. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I feared the worst,’ Hugo said and stood like a statue when Libby brushed her lips against his cold cheek.
‘I wrote to you at your Mayfair address, did you not get it? I would have sent a cable but the French pretend they don’t understand English though I’m sure they do.’ Libby took Hugo’s hand, wound her fingers through his and willed herself to stop her nervous chatter. ‘There was no need to worry. Freddy behaved like a perfect gentleman but he had just been shot. The doctor said that he shouldn’t even think about travelling for at least a week.’
It was a little lie. There was no point in explaining about Freddy’s bloody book and how he’d refused to leave the hotel until it was written. That he was ‘in the rhythm’ and couldn’t possibly be disrupted.
Hugo frowned again. ‘So the doctor was one of the few Frogs who did speak English, then? How convenient.’
‘Please don’t be like this. I’ve been longing to see you,’ Libby said because it was the truth. The time she’d spent with Freddy had been a salutary reminder that he was maddening, infuriating, always determined to have his own way. Whereas Hugo, when he wasn’t radiating this cold anger that chilled Libby right through, was kind and loving. ‘Besides, now that he’s back in London, he says he’ll go to see a lawyer about the divorce.’
Freddy had said no such thing. They hadn’t even talked about it since the first night in Paris, but Freddy had agreed in spirit and Libby would frogmarch him to the Inns of Court if she had to.
‘It’s still too late for the baby to have my name,’ Hugo said and Libby thought she might scream, because it was very disheartening to love someone who spent so much time pointing out all the ways in which that love was an encumbrance to him. ‘But the little one’s well, isn’t he?’
‘It might be a she,’ Libby said, somewhat mollified. ‘In fact, I call it the pickle. I’m five months gone now and I imagine it’s about the size of a gherkin.’
Hugo looked quite startled that Libby would compare his child to the pickled cucumbers that were all she craved but couldn’t eat because they gave her terrible heartburn. Then he grinned. ‘The pickle, then. I hope the pickle’s well. And you look well too. Positively blooming. Quite, quite ripe.’
A moment ago, Libby had been exasperated with Hugo but now she’d all but forgotten how to breathe as his eyes rested on the burgeoning swell of her breasts that strained against her blouse. It was odd because as her body grew heavier, ungainly, clumsy, more unattractive, Libby constantly felt the pull of desire throbbing in her. How she’d hungered for him during their time apart. She was soft and pliant whereas Hugo was hard, so male. ‘There have been some nights I haven’t been able to sleep because all I can think about is you,’ her voice a sultry whisper as she leaned close to him. ‘Of how much I want you. I’m quite mad from it.’
‘Oh, Libby…’ he half groaned and pulled her closer so he could kiss her. Not a chaste Sunday morning kiss but desperate open-mouthed kisses, his hands clutching hold of her arms to keep her still. ‘What you do to me.’
Libby strained to get closer, kissed Hugo with just as much fervour, pressed her aching breasts to his chest and it still wasn’t enough to assuage her.
‘More. I need more,’ she hissed, seizing hold of his hand to guide him to where she wanted him most.
‘Someone might see,’ Hugo said against her mouth but his hand was already at her knee, smoothing up her thigh under her skirt to trace the edge of her stocking top. ‘I should stop, don’t you think?’
At any other time Libby would have revelled in his playfulness. ‘No one will see. There’s no one about. They’re all at church or still in bed. Please, Hugo. Please don’t stop. I’ll scream if you stop.’
She’d barely finished begging when his fingers were there, where she was slick with need, knuckle deep. Libby half rose up on the seat then sank back down, so his grip on her tightened, their foreheads touching, Libby letting out every breath that Hugo took in.
It took no time at all for Libby to reach her crisis, to cry out so that birds pecking the ground in the little clearing cried out too, then flew for the safety of the treetops. It was barely enough; she could have gone again and again. ‘Let’s go back to the house,’ she said and his fingers, still inside her, trembled at the notion. ‘We could spend the whole day in bed. Wouldn’t that be lovely?’
But then he was pulling free of her. ‘It would be wonderful but I’m afraid I can’t.’ Hugo prised her hand off his prick, which was hard and eager, unlike the rest of him. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to,’ he added as Libby’s face fell and a shameful blush crept over her. ‘I do. More than anything, but I have to be in Manchester before dark and there isn’t a stick of furniture in the house.’
‘There isn’t, is there? I was meant to be organising that before I had to go to Paris.’ Libby smoothed down her skirt. ‘Once all that’s sorted, we can move in, can’t we? Be together properly, no more sneaking about.’
Hugo fished in his coat pocket. ‘In a perfect world this would be a ring,’ he said, handing her a door key. ‘But my world is far from perfect. Go back to Heal’s, tell them to deliver as soon as they can. Can’t have you living in Hampstead now that your Freddy’s back. It’s hardly appropriate.’
Living in the same house as her husband was the most respectable thing Libby had done in months but she doubted Hugo would appreciate the joke. Not when Hugo’s smile was already slipping, his eyes half closing as if he were anticipating a heavy blow. ‘You needn’t worry about Freddy. He won’t cause any trouble. He knows you’re the one I love, the one I want to be with. I wish I could be with you right now for ever and ever,’ Libby said a little desperately, because it felt as if Hugo were slipping away. ‘You’ll be back soon?’
‘I’ll be back before you know it.’ Hugo put his arm around Libby, pulled her in for a kiss so sweet, so solemn, it made Libby want to cry.
It was as if all those months spent in Spain, in heat and light and sun, had left an indelible impression on Freddy.
Not only did he insist that Hannah opened the curtains each morning so the rooms of 17 Willoughby Square were no longer dark and gloomy, but he had the house crawling with workmen installing electricity. There were wires, mysterious little boxes and other strange apparatus in every corner of the house though Libby simply couldn’t fathom how the electricity would happen once they were done with their hammering and drilling and doing things with teeny, tiny screwdrivers.
Libby had expected Millicent to have a serious attack of the vapours at all this shocking modernity, but Freddy had a way of bringing light into the house that was nothing to do with the boxes of bulbs waiting to be fitted.
‘Come on, Ma! It’s like the Dark Ages in this place,’ he’d laughed when Millicent expressed her unease at his plans for electrification, even though he was paying for it all with his book money. ‘Time you started living in the twentieth century.’
With her darling boy back, Millicent swept about the house with a vigour which Libby wouldn’t have believed possible. She also had the men from the electricity company to harangue for making a mess, which meant that Hannah was free from her constant scolding, so she was cheerier and the old ladies were quite giddy that Freddy also had plans for a boiler that would issue forth hot water.
‘When a kindly American publisher buys my book,’ he promised, joining them for dinner one evening, though usually he sequestered himself in the morning room during the day; pounding at his typewriter, drinking endless cups of coffee and chain-smoking.
The salesmen came and went, mostly went, so their opinions weren’t canvassed but Potts was the only resident of Willoughby Square not taken with the new improvements. ‘I don’t trust electricity,’ he told Libby as he walked out with her one Monday morning. It wasn’t even halfway through October but felt later in the year, the night creeping in far earlier than it should so that Libby welcomed the arrival of electric light. Couldn’t come quick enough, though she doubted she’d still be around by the time the work was finished. ‘I don’t trust things I can’t see.’
‘You don’t trust things you can’t see, but you say that you can see ghosts. Can you understand my scepticism?’ she asked drily.
‘I do see things.’ Potts shot Libby a sideways glance. ‘I can see that you’re in the family way, sweetling, for one thing.’
‘Hardly. I just spent two weeks in Paris waiting for Freddy to finish his damn book with nothing to do but go to cafés and eat cake. Ever such a lot of cake,’ Libby said with all the wide-eyed candour of her ingénue days.
‘Cake? Bun in the oven, more like,’ Potts muttered darkly and Libby sniffed as if she were offended and was glad that it was now time for them to part ways at the top of Hampstead High Street.
She was showing in a way that she hadn’t been before she went to Paris. Then, she’d had a slight thickening of her middle. Now, her skirts would only fasten with the help of a safety pin and her belly had become rounded and plump.
Soon people would notice and intrude and interfere. Pass judgement, which was why she was hurrying to school early to catch Beryl before assembly.
Libby had bought presents from Paris; a pretty tin of biscuits, a jar of cherries steeped in brandy, and she waited nervously as Beryl exclaimed over her gifts. She’d never have imagined that she’d be nervous of Beryl but her loose navy wool dress was suddenly constricting and making her skin itch.
‘I’m going to have a child,’ Libby heard herself say while her mind was still plotting the right way, the right moment, to say it. And there was more. ‘It’s not Freddy’s. I’ve been seeing someone else. We’re in love, Beryl.’ Love was the ultimate excuse. It was unimpeachable, irrefutable.
‘What on earth do you mean?’ It came out as an indignant squeak. ‘You never mentioned being in love before.’
‘Hugo, he’s the father, he’s married,’ Libby explained. ‘He’s getting a divorce. Though that’s nothing to do with me. Although it is how we met. It’s quite an amusing story really.’
‘You never told me anything about a Hugo either. I thought we were friends,’ Beryl added, and she wrapped her arms around her bird-like frame, a hurt, reproachful look on her face as if Libby had just pinched her. ‘Friends don’t keep secrets from each other.’
‘We are friends. I’m very fond of you, which is why I didn’t want you to think the worst of me.’ They were standing in Beryl’s minuscule office. There was barely enough room in it for a desk, a bureau and a couple of chairs. Libby only had to take two steps to reach Beryl’s side. ‘I appreciate I’ve put you in a terrible bind. That if word got out, it would cause a scandal, parents pulling their little darlings out of school and such.’
‘Not that it’s any of their business and it’s not as if they’re to know that your husband has been abroad.’ Beryl gasped indignantly again. ‘Freddy was in Spain risking life and limb to report on the creeping Fascist menace and you…’
This was the bother with telling the truth. It led to revealing yet more unpalatable truths. ‘Don’t go painting Freddy as some tragic hero,’ Libby said sharply. ‘He left me in Paris last year in the most hurtful, callous circumstances and I won’t be condemned for finding the courage to love again.’
She drew herself up. It was easy enough to tower over Beryl even when one wasn’t standing on the moral high ground. ‘Shall I resign? Save you the trouble of firing me?’
Beryl rubbed her upper arms as if she were cold, her bulging gaze resting on Libby’s bulging belly though she still had her coat on so there wasn’t much to see. ‘Very well, stay until the end of term,’ she said rather ungraciously. ‘Once it, the baby, is born, you’ll give up work anyway.’
‘I suppose.’ Libby hadn’t given the matter much thought, though she wasn’t sure that she’d want to be solely reliant on Hugo providing for her. Enough that he had her heart to do with what he wanted. She remembered her father coming home from work of a Friday evening. He’d sit down at the kitchen table and hand his pay packet over to her mother. ‘I’ve put some by and taken what I need for the week, the rest is your housekeeping, Ida.’ He had the softest brown eyes, her father, and a droopy moustache that tickled when he kissed Libby goodnight. ‘Don’t spend it all at once.’
‘I’ll try not to,’ her mother would say. She’d send Libby and Charlotte to fetch their Friday fish and chips and when they got home, her mother would be perched on her father’s lap and the mood in their little house would be so light and gay.
Libby blinked back tears at the memory dredged up from where she’d long buried it. The best, brightest memories were also the most painful ones.
‘Libby? We’re agreed then? You’ll stay until the end of term?’ Beryl said querulously in a way that was at odds with her anxious expression as if she hated having it out with people more than anything else in the world.
‘December it is.’
‘I won’t be here come January anyway,’ Beryl added a little defiantly, sitting down at her little desk and shuffling a pile of papers, so she looked as if she were pretending to be grown up; a respectable headmistress. ‘I’ve been offered the chance to open a Steiner Waldorf School in New York. I had half thought you might come with me. You did say how much you wanted to go back to America. I don’t suppose you will now.’
‘Babies are rather portable,’ Libby said heatedly. ‘In China, the peasants give birth in the paddy fields and carry on picking rice with the babies strapped to their back. Not that I plan on doing that but there are women who work, travel, all sorts, and manage to be mothers too.’
The clock chimed the hour and all at once there was the sound of many pairs of little feet running down the corridor outside. ‘You’ll be late to take the register,’ Beryl said coldly, which didn’t suit her.
Libby wondered if she’d be added to the list of other women who had failed to hold Beryl in the same regard as she held them. She was at the door when she heard Beryl get to her feet.
‘I don’t understand, Libby,’ she said plaintively. ‘How other people seem to fall in and out of love so easily. Shouldn’t love mean more than that?’
Libby turned to see Beryl standing there, looking utterly woebegone. ‘Falling in love is the easy part,’ she said. ‘It’s falling out of love that’s difficult.’