The Moon At Midnight

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Come on then.’ Seeing the acute disappointment hovering in Tam’s eyes, of a sudden Max relented, knowing that he couldn’t let him down. He put his arm round the younger boy’s shoulders. ‘Lead the way, if you must. After all, the world may not be here tomorrow.’

  When they reached the alleyway outside the theatre, Tam rewarded Max with a beautifully executed cartwheel. Max watched him affectionately.

  ‘Any more of that nonsense and you’ll be joining the profession, my boy.’

  They walked along together towards the Savoy.

  ‘My dad would have a heart attack if I became an actor.’

  Tam stared thoughtfully ahead. Max was lucky in that way. His father was a non-runner, having never showed at any point in his life, and his grandfather, like Tam’s grandfather, more or less went along with anything that Max wanted, just so long as he didn’t take the pants off him at golf too often.

  ‘Your dad’s made a great success of his cars. You’ll go into cars like him, and have a ball,’ Max prophesied. He smiled at Tam. ‘You forget I remember you when you were driving better than Stirling Moss and you were all of ten, mate. You’ll be winning the British Grand Prix by the time you’re my age, see if you won’t. Besides, someone like you, you don’t want to be an actor.’

  ‘I’d love to be an actor.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘How do you know I wouldn’t?’

  They were outside the Savoy now, and Max turned to Tam.

  ‘Because, dear boy,’ he drawled, ‘because you are, and always will be, Tam Sykes. You are you. It’s only someone like me who has to become someone else, someone who doesn’t know who he is.’

  Max strode ahead of Tam, his head thrown back, his long dark hair lit of a sudden by the overhead lights of the hotel foyer.

  ‘Someone who fears that they are really no one, that’s who has to become an actor, Tam. We can play a king, or a duke, a poet or a prince, and in those hours we are them! What could be better? Nine to five in an office? Not on your nelly. I shall be who I want, when I want.’

  Tam quickly followed his hero across the hotel foyer, hoping that by the time they found the rest of their party he might have twigged what the great Max was on about.

  * * *

  Flavia threw one last look in the becomingly pink mirror of the Savoy ladies’ loo and then followed the rest of her party out of the doors into the hotel corridor. She was wearing a beautiful pink dress that Mattie had bought her, right out of the blue, that afternoon. It was silk, with a matching jacket, and it made her look so sophisticated that Flavia knew that the moment she walked up to Max Eastcott, and all the rest of them, they would not be able to take their eyes off her. The new shorter style of skirt was serving to make her already long legs look even longer, while the crisp cut of the boxy long-sleeved jacket showed off her nineteen-inch waist to such a flattering degree that it would make every man in the room long to put both their hands around it to see if they could span it.

  ‘I am beautiful, I am beautiful, I am beautiful.’

  Flavia always said that, silently of course, to herself as she walked along. She had read in a book that the exquisite Regency buck, Beau Brummell, never checked his clothes once his valet had finished dressing him. It seemed that the famous dandy had opined that once you left the hands of your valet you should never once check your dress, or glance in a looking glass. So now, as she walked across to the rest of her party determined not to glance in any mirror that she passed, Flavia gave herself social strength by silently reassuring herself of her beauty. Belief after all was everything. If she stopped believing that she was beautiful she might stop being beautiful, and that would be the end, because, as her father often teased her, she was certainly never going to have brains. ‘Thick as a plank, our Flavia,’ Peter would say proudly, to anyone who would listen. Thinking of this, Flavia tossed her auburn hair back, and thrust her hips forward in imitation of a top model.

  ‘Hallo, Max.’

  ‘Ah, Flah-viah!’

  Flavia stared up at Max Eastcott, her face deliberately expressionless. What a pity he hadn’t changed at all since he’d left Bexham for London, and her family’d left it for Churchester. He knew that Flavia always found her name embarrassing. It wasn’t her fault that her mother had seen The Prisoner of Zenda, not once, but nine times.

  She sighed loudly, tossing her hair back yet again. Max was quite obviously just the same as he’d been when they were all young, and he was always to be found sitting on the harbour wall, or on the village green, making fun of everyone and everything. So here he was again, still the same old Max Eastcott, waiting to squash Flavia by making fun of her name, just as he had been satirising everything on stage tonight.

  ‘Actually, you were very good, Max,’ Flavia told him in her cold, oddly mature way. ‘Really, very good. Very funny.’

  Max nodded. Holding a French cigarette between his teeth he lit it with a Zippo lighter while smiling back in an equally patronising way at Flavia.

  ‘Oh, I was very good, was I, Flah-viah?’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘You’re really quite talented you know.’

  ‘How would you know how talented I was?’

  Flavia shrugged her shoulders. ‘Because boys like you . . .’ she allowed a cruel pause, before finishing, ‘usually are, aren’t they, Max?’

  Once again Flavia tossed her beautiful auburn head of hair and moved away from him with the kind of smile that Max felt would have done credit to the Snow Queen. Happily at that precise moment John Tate arrived at his stepson’s shoulder and pushed a glass of champagne into his hand.

  ‘Well done, old chap.’

  John was trying so hard to look enthusiastic that Max found himself feeling almost sorry for his stepfather.

  ‘Did you really like it?’

  ‘Yes, I really enjoyed it, Max, really.’ John nodded vigorously.

  ‘It was such a pity that you couldn’t be at the first night. It went so well, the first night, it was unbelievable.’ Max stared past his stepfather, his expression sad to the point of misery. ‘People were being taken out. The Daily Mail said that someone actually had a heart attack they laughed so much. It put – the laughter – it put something like ten or twelve minutes on the running time.’

  John patted Max on the shoulder with his free hand.

  ‘We both wanted to be at your first night, Max, but you know what happened, don’t you? Mummy told you, didn’t she? I had the Scottish opening of the new shop, arranged months ago, and Mummy had really bad influenza.’ John frowned, remembering how ill Mattie had been. ‘Still, here we are now, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves tonight, really we did.’

  ‘Mmm, well, I’m glad you enjoyed it, because up there, for us, it was really, really hard work. The point is the audiences are so nervous – they can hardly bring themselves to even smile. You get the feeling they’re just listening for the sirens, or something. But I have to say “Not With A Whimper” went better tonight than it has for a long while.’

  Max stared into this stepfather’s eyes, realising that the poor man was in such shock over what he had been put through that evening that he couldn’t take in a word of what Max was saying. Worse than that, Max had the feeling that John wasn’t even very interested in how well the show had gone on the first night, or indeed any other night. Max stubbed out his cigarette and promptly lit another as John nodded and smiled, but moved quickly away.

  ‘Hanging, drawing and quartering’s too good for you. Daddy’s thinking of brand new things to do to someone who stands up and makes fun of everything he holds sacred, Max Eastcott.’

  Max turned to see who it was, although suspecting already that it had to be Walter Tate’s daughter Kim. Greatly daring she’d crept up behind Max and tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me. I saw your father’s face, after the show. What about Judy? She feel the same?’ Max took a deep draught of his wine, and stared so miserably at Kim that for
the first time in her life she started to feel sorry for him.

  ‘Not so much, no. Mummy just keeps saying it’s difficult for the old folks to understand you making fun of the war, and all that – you know, because of losing all their friends, and so on.’ Kim wriggled her feet in her new shoes, staring up at Max, who she always felt was almost a cousin, even though strictly speaking he wasn’t really.

  ‘We’re not making fun of the war,’ Max insisted. ‘We’re making fun of war, and the hypocrisies, and war films, and all that. That’s what we’re making fun of, not the people who died, or fought. No one in your family seems to understand that. It’s just humour, ha, ha, ha, not a political statement for God’s sake. Just meant to make people laugh, but no one seems to have twigged that.’

  ‘I do.’ Jenny, who now joined them, smiled up at Max. ‘I thought it was wonderful,’ she told him diffidently, because she always found that there was something about Max that was a little awe-inspiring. ‘Really, really wonderful. I laughed till I cried.’

  ‘Did you, did you really?’

  Max’s anxious expression reminded Jenny of young Sholto at the beginning of term when he was about to go back to school, trying to pretend to himself that everything was going to be all right.

  ‘Yes, I did. Everyone did. Everyone from Bexham loved it, didn’t they, Kim?’

  Kim nodded. ‘Yes, they did,’ she agreed, her own expression serious for once. ‘Everyone.’

  Max was prepared to believe them both until he looked across the room and noted that his mother and stepfather were standing on their own looking nothing if not dismal.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said abruptly, and once again he drank his glass of champagne far too quickly, not caring. Best to blot everything out and hope for the best, although he had very little of that particular commodity left in the locker. He squinted surreptitiously down at his watch. By now Maisie would be singing at the Place as she usually did after the show. If she was, he had a funny feeling he might just be in luck with her tonight. That after all, at the end of the famous day, was one helluva way to go, with Maisie wrapped around you.

  Chapter Two

  Waldo Astley was standing in front of Meggie’s portrait, as he nearly always did late at night. It was over fourteen years since the love of his life had died in his arms. Despite the length of time that had passed between that terrible moment and the present, it was rare that a few hours elapsed when he didn’t think of her and send news, and love, to his darling Meggie. She was as much with him as ever, and always would be, perhaps even more now. He tried to imagine how she would take the present crisis, the world faced with its own ending, and it seemed to him that she would be as courageous as she’d always been, hating to show fear, even should she be feeling it.

  The ringing of the telephone interrupted the loving intensity of his thoughts. He quickly went to it, for despite the fact that he had no real family or dependants the sound of a telephone ringing late at night was always worrying.

  ‘Waldo?’

  ‘Lionel.’

  ‘Can I come round?’ Lionel sounded vague and uncertain as if he didn’t quite know why he was ringing, and at the same time embarrassed that he was disturbing Waldo so late.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘I can’t, either. Come round, do.’

  Waldo replaced the telephone. The Cuban crisis, the idea of the world teetering on the edge of nuclear war, as the newspapers kept describing it, must be much worse for his old friend Lionel, for unlike Waldo he must fear terribly for his daughter Mattie, and his grandson, Max.

  ‘Jolly decent of you, old chap. I’m feeling a bit wobbly, on my own, I don’t know why.’

  Lionel touched his thin white moustache lightly as Waldo put an arm round the old man’s shoulder and shepherded him into the drawing room.

  ‘Come and be wobbly with me, Lionel, over a whisky and soda.’

  All at once, standing in Waldo’s drawing room with its beautiful furnishings, its silk wallpaper and pale eau-de-Nil curtains, its cerise brocade Knole sofa, and velvet buttoned chairs, and last but not least its beautiful, posthumous portrait of Meggie Gore-Stewart, Waldo’s wife of only a few days, or was it hours – Lionel couldn’t quite remember – was like stepping into heaven.

  Everything in the room was so beautiful and inviting, it made him catch his breath. The fire burning brightly, despite its being nearly midnight when most people’s fires would be out, the cut glass decanters, the Irish Waterford crystal whisky glass that Waldo was putting into Lionel’s hand – everything, every damn thing in that room, including Waldo, was a reason for living, and not dying, a reason for loving the world, not hating it so much you couldn’t wait to destroy it.

  ‘Cheers.’ Lionel raised his glass. ‘Awfully good of you to have me round. I must admit I was beginning to feel a bit odd on my own.’

  ‘Been listening or watching for the news?’

  ‘Both,’ Lionel admitted. ‘Just can’t sleep,’ he added rather unnecessarily.

  ‘I keep wondering when, in the whole history of mankind, this has happened before, and I can’t remember a single instance. I mean we all thought Hiroshima was a one off, didn’t we?’ Waldo frowned vaguely up at the ceiling as Lionel stared into his whisky glass.

  ‘The way I see it, it’s quite possible that one or other of these politicos will make a mistake. Didn’t someone say that the last time the famous red telephone rang in the President’s Oval office he picked it up and it was a Chinese laundry?’

  ‘That wasn’t someone, Lionel, that was me.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it was you, of course it was you, Waldo. You’re one of the few people who tells me anything interesting – you, and young Max. Everyone else talks down to me, I don’t know why. I get fed up with it sometimes, really I do.’

  Waldo decided to ignore this, instead staring up once again at Meggie’s portrait over the fireplace.

  ‘Do you remember how wonderful Meggie’s laugh was, Lionel?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  Waldo knew that nowadays Lionel always pretended not to hear something he thought might be upsetting.

  ‘I said—’ Waldo smiled, knowing exactly. ‘I said – do you remember how wonderful Meggie’s laugh was?’ He went back to staring up at the portrait. ‘She had a wonderful, wonderful laugh, didn’t she?’

  Now Lionel too looked up at the painting of Meggie. She had been so beautiful, and so brave, and for once he could honestly say that the portrait actually did justice to the sitter. The artist had depicted Meggie staring out at the rest of the world with more than a hint of amusement in her large blue eyes, one hand resting on a model of the racing yacht she’d loved so much – the aptly named Lightheart.

  ‘She did have a wonderful laugh,’ Lionel agreed. ‘So full of gaiety.’

  But after staring up at the painting for a good minute he suddenly burst into tears.

  ‘I’m so sorry, really, so sorry,’ he said, quickly putting his glass down on a side table, and taking out an immaculate silk handkerchief to dry his eyes. ‘Really, I am so sorry. I used to be better than this. It’s just that I can’t bear to think of all the young not having a go at life. I’m so afraid of them being taken early like poor Meggie. Whatever’s happened to us, at least we’ve been given a chance to take a pot shot at living.’ He wiped his eyes on his handkerchief, and shook his head. ‘It’s all so dreadful, really it is.’

  ‘Refill needed.’ Waldo leaned forward and picking up Lionel’s glass he went to the drinks table to refresh both their drinks. ‘Here’s to tomorrow.’ He raised his glass encouragingly once more, as Lionel shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry, Waldo old chap, I think I must’ve been listening to the news too much.’

  ‘We’ve all been listening to the news too much.’

  ‘Worrying times—’

  ‘They are indeed.’

  They both drank deeply.

  ‘Heard anything on your Ame
rican grapevine, old boy?’

  ‘Nothing except there’s a vast increase in the sale of fall-out shelters, and a large number of people have disappeared into caves, which I think sounds quite sensible really. I think I might hide in a cave somewhere round here, if they weren’t all waterlogged.’

  ‘It’s coming up to twelve o’clock – shall we?’ Lionel’s eyes switched mournfully towards the large mahogany radio set in the corner of the room.

  ‘Why not?’ Waldo stood up. ‘After all, we’re still alive; Bexham’s still here, so that must mean something. Not only that, but there’s always the risk we might hear some good news.’

  But there was none. The Russian convoy carrying nuclear warheads had not turned back. Indeed far from turning back it seemed they were still set securely en route for Cuba. The only hopeful news was that while neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev had made a move towards conciliation, they had not made one of aggression either.

  ‘It’s not quite stalemate, at least not yet, I wouldn’t have thought.’ Waldo’s darkly handsome, middle-aged face looked across at his old bridge-playing partner.

  ‘No, it’s not stalemate,’ Lionel agreed. ‘But there’s still no sign of Russia backing down, and if she was going to, I would have thought that she would have done so by now. Kipling said that the Russians are a wonderful people – until they take off their jackets.’

  ‘I would hate to be Kennedy. Russia is not bullied. Remember Churchill said the only man who ever succeeded in frightening him was Stalin.’

  Waldo paused for a moment, thinking this statement over, while at the same time lighting a large cigar.

  ‘Do you know something, Lionel? You’ve actually cheered me up.’ As Lionel said nothing in reply to this, he went on, ‘I’m now going to go to sleep tonight thanking God that at least it’s not Kennedy versus Stalin. It may be clutching at straws but that at least is something.’

  Soon after that, both cheered and comforted by his old friend, Lionel took his leave of Cucklington House and walked home alone. Since giving way to his emotions in front of Waldo, it seemed to him that he had at last discovered just what kind of an old fool he actually was. No wonder John and Mattie were always talking down to him as if he was a child of nine. He must have really embarrassed Waldo giving way like that. He hoped he hadn’t, but he was sure he probably had. He put his front door key in the lock of his house, finding that as soon as he did so the telephone was ringing. This time it was Waldo telephoning to him.