The Moon At Midnight

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘OK, so it’s time for a change,’ Loopy told Jenny without any preamble, having greeted her with a kiss.

  Jenny stared at her. Perhaps because Loopy was an older woman, Jenny felt less imperfect in front of her grandmother than she did in front of Mattie. It was as if the older woman had scars that Jenny couldn’t see, scars which were as real as Jenny’s own none the less.

  ‘How do you mean, time for a change?’

  ‘I mean just that, it’s time for a change, darling. Change of bedroom, change of view. So boring to stay in one place. So, you’re coming to me at Shelborne, OK?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Jenny’s voice was still so listless it was hardly audible.

  ‘You’re coming to me, to my house, to stay with me, and I’ll tell you why, because I need you to help me with my painting. See these?’ She held up one of her hands and waggled her fingers at Jenny. ‘They’re giving me gip this damp old winter. I need someone to squeeze the tubes for me, or I will never finish what I have to do in time for my next exhibition. Waldo will drop me from his list, and I will then be out of a job, and getting in everyone’s way. So what do you say, will you come and help?’

  Because she couldn’t think of what to say, Jenny found herself nodding in agreement.

  ‘Good oh. Then put your outdoor things on, and follow me. Mummy and Daddy will bring your suitcase round to Shelborne later.’

  For Mattie, seeing Loopy coming downstairs with Jenny on her arm was a more than difficult moment, it was a shocking moment. The realisation that her mother-in-law had succeeded where Mattie had failed was devastating, and yet when Jenny suddenly stopped at the front door, reluctant to go any further, Mattie’s heart stopped with her.

  ‘People will stare, I hate people staring.’ Jenny turned to her grandmother, the expression on her face one of outright panic.

  ‘No, they won’t, we won’t let them.’

  ‘People stared terribly in the hospital when I was leaving.’

  ‘Then we’ll stare right back. Now come on, Gwen’s made tea, and you know what that’s like, if anyone’s more than two minutes late she moans terribly that we’re keeping her from her telly. Besides, I have to get back to finish off a piece of the sky.’

  Having packed a case for Jenny, Mattie watched as the two of them walked slowly down the front garden to the gate, then she went immediately to her small desk in the corner of the sitting room and sat down to write to Sholto at his boarding school.

  Darling Sholto, I do hope you’re not too worried about Jenny, because if you are, don’t be. She’s come home from the hospital, and is staying with Grandy and Grandpa. We’re all very thrilled to have her back, as you can imagine, Grandy most of all because Jenny is helping her with her paints on account of her fingers being a bit stiff at the moment. All the animals send their love, specially old Tousle. He misses you dreadfully, as I expect you miss him. It was a bit windy today, but the boats still went out, and I saw two yachts sailing round the Point so fast it was amazing. Do try hard with your Latin even though you hate it. Lots and lots of love, Mummy xxxxxxxxxx

  Mattie licked the envelope, licked the stamp, and then put the letter on the table beside her, wishing that it was the holidays and that Sholto was at home to play Scrabble with her. She glanced up at the clock. At least John would be home soon and he would help her pack up Jenny’s things, and take them round to Shelborne, but whatever anyone said, relieved though Mattie was that Jenny had at last taken it into her head to go out and about, the fact was it was Loopy who’d wrought the miracle with Jenny, not Mattie, and that made Mattie feel not just wanting, but a complete failure.

  Jenny settled contentedly into Shelborne in a way that continued to hurt her mother and, not unnaturally, delighted Loopy. She knew that Mattie must be hurt by her daughter’s choice, but sometimes, as Loopy knew only too well, hurt maternal feelings had to be put aside for the good of something much more important – in this case, Jenny.

  Besides, Loopy thought, perhaps wrongly, that she knew a little bit more about depression and its physical effects than Mattie did, or ever would, she devoutly hoped. The months and years when her middle son, Walter, was missing presumed killed had taught Jenny’s grandmother more about that particular form of continuing despair than she ever wished to learn. She knew what it was like to wake to darkness twenty-four hours a day. She knew what it was like not even to want to see those you loved, to care where they were, to mind about how much they cared for you. She knew what it was like when your pillow turned to stone, the floor beneath your feet to marshmallow, when every substance on earth, even earth itself, presented itself in a different, nightmarish form.

  But despite Loopy’s understanding, despite the fact that Jenny actually allowed her grandmother and grandfather to drive her about – as long as she was able to sit in the back seat, in the no man’s land between the windscreen and the oval back window of Hugh’s Rover 14 – it was Dauncy, her youngest son, back from the States with his lovely young wife Letty and their twin sons, who precipitated the necessary breakthrough.

  With relatives running all over the house, and the consequent loss of privacy, Loopy was sure that Jenny would hightail it back to her parents’ home. Jenny after all had a horror of anyone seeing her face. She did hightail it out of sight, which was perfectly understandable, but not back to her parents’ house. She hightailed it up to Loopy’s studio.

  With Loopy out of the way seeing to her visitors, Jenny found herself at a loose end. Unable to just sit about staring at the view of the harbour and the water that the first-floor studio enjoyed, and in her grandmother’s absence unable to occupy herself in squeezing tubes and handing them to Loopy, Jenny found herself drawing the view, and then painting it.

  Except she didn’t draw it once, she drew it over and over again, just as she painted it over and over again, never happy with the result, rubbing off the paint from the small canvas, only to re-apply it in tiny strokes. Time had seemed to cut itself into wedges like a too-heavy sponge cake made by some doting relative, and as with an unappetising cake time had to be got through, had to be swallowed, appreciated, only because it was there. Now, while she painted, perfected, groaned at her ineptitude, started again, over and over, until at last, as Dauncy and his family departed to complete their tour of England, the painting was finished, Jenny looked round and found to her astonishment that a week had flown by.

  ‘You don’t want to see it.’

  ‘No, of course I don’t.’ Loopy looked calmly across at her granddaughter.

  ‘I don’t want to show it to you.’ Jenny walked over to the window, staring out at the scene below, which she knew had eluded her. ‘I don’t want to show it to you because I know it’s no good.’

  ‘And I don’t want to see it because I know it’s going to be better than anything I could do, so that’s all right, neither of us wants me to see it.’

  Jenny looked back at Loopy, at the same time turning the painting towards her grandmother. There was a small silence, and then Loopy patted her granddaughter lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘This is good.’ She gave Jenny a shrewd look. ‘This is a good painting, and I will tell you why, because you have not depicted, you have painted. You have made a painting, not just a pale imitation. The waves, the boats, everything you have seen you have translated into a proper painting. That is what artistry is all about. Well done. It has a wonderful passion to it, this painting of yours. I wish I’d started younger, I’d have more vigour, the way you have, you lucky girl.’

  ‘You paint wonderfully, Grandy, you know you do.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I paint adequately. I started too late. I’m simply not good enough. I sell because people share my vision of life, and they like what they see. Painting, for all that people intellectualise it, is, at the end of the day, Jenny, only entertainment on walls. Because it’s sometimes a very painful process we try to make more of it than we should. Of course it’s difficult, but then so is being a surgeon, so is being
a general in an army. Doing anything properly is difficult. We mustn’t make art into a special case; to do so is, in many ways, to demean it. It is a necessary and vital part of life, but it isn’t, if you will forgive the analogy, the whole picture!’

  Loopy laughed lightly. She wasn’t given to making speeches, but, knowing Jenny as she did, she knew that while she might be pushing the verbal boat out a little too far, Jenny would be listening. Of all their grandchildren she was the one to whom Hugh and Loopy most related. Not that they didn’t love them all, but Jenny had always seemed, quite naturally, to be closer to them in type, loving to play duets on the piano with Hugh, always sitting quite quietly, from a very young age, while Loopy painted, before the arthritis in her fingers and wrists made it less easy to do just what she wanted when she wanted.

  Now the arthritis, because it meant she needed help, was helping Jenny, so, as Loopy always believed, some good was coming out of bad, something positive out of her pain.

  But it wasn’t just Dauncy visiting with his family that brought Jenny to begin to realise her artistry. Sometimes when the house was empty, Hugh having taken himself off to the Three Tuns, or to visit old friends down at the Yacht Club, Jenny would slip downstairs and play her grandfather’s piano. Loopy would be painting busily but unable to help noticing the sound drifting upstairs, or that it was a quite different sound from Hugh’s, that there was a deeper, more plangent quality to her granddaughter’s playing. And as she listened, it seemed to Loopy that here too Jenny could find some sort of relief from the pain of what had happened to her, some kind of escape from her all too visible scars, from the realisation that she might never even be considered pretty again.

  Nothing was said, not only because that was not Loopy’s way, but because age had brought her to the knowledge that to comment on something was, all too often, to kill it stone dead. Artistic achievement was come upon in silence, as was healing.

  Loopy had therefore said nothing to Hugh about Jenny, neither her paintings nor her piano playing, she had simply let it be. She pretended not to miss her tube squeezer, but merely arranged for Jenny to put the paints in squeezing order, and she herself got on with her work.

  It was therefore only when Hugh returned early one day from his walk, the weather having suddenly turned, catching him unprepared in a heavy shower, so that he had hurried home to the warmth and comfort of his house, that he heard Jenny playing his beloved Blüthner. He knew it was his Blüthner, the way he would know the footsteps of his owner if he was a dog. He hurried through the gardens from the towpath along which he always returned, and started to let himself quietly into the drawing room, through the French windows, only to be hauled away by Loopy who’d seen him hurrying up to the back of the house from her studio window.

  ‘Shsh!’ Loopy put her finger to her lips, and beckoned to Hugh to follow her round to the back door.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Hugh asked, a little too loudly, as he always did when he was interrupted or put off course in any way.

  ‘Nothing’s the matter, Hugh,’ Loopy told him, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice. ‘Far from it, everything’s fine and dandy. No, what isn’t the matter is Jenny.’ She put her finger to her lips again. ‘Listen.’

  Hugh listened. His granddaughter was playing a piece of Mozart. It was definitely Mozart, a piece he couldn’t quite identify, but she was playing it quite beautifully. He stood listening, recognising the new, deeper tone that Loopy had been privileged to hear developing over the past weeks.

  ‘She’s playing just like my mother,’ Hugh said, turning to Loopy, astonished. ‘My mother played the piano just like that, after she lost her first baby, the baby before me. The power – it’s not like a woman playing at all, more like a man. Such power – you’d never know it was a sixteen-year-old girl playing, would you?’

  Loopy shook her head. Darling Hugh was so silly. Even though he loved women, he couldn’t help making ridiculous comments, but that mattered not a whit. What mattered was that she knew from looking at his face that she’d been right – Jenny’s talent was becoming exceptional.

  Hugh turned to Loopy.

  ‘We must help that,’ he said, factually. ‘Not to help that would be criminal.’

  ‘Yes, it’s what she needs to rebuild her confidence, I agree – always remembering, though, that since the accident the last thing that Jenny will ever do is appear in public.’

  It was a challenge to Hugh, as much as to Jenny, and Loopy knew it. He turned away, his expression one of grim determination. Loopy knew that expression. It was one that had helped them all through the war. No matter what, now, as far as Hugh was concerned, his granddaughter Jenny was going to appear in public, playing the piano and dressed in a beautiful gown, that is if her grandfather had anything to do with it.

  Long before he collapsed while walking home with Waldo Astley, Lionel had suspected that there might be something wrong with his health. He was too sensible not to notice that he kept feeling giddy at odd times, but he was also determined not to let it worry him. In his opinion, as he’d told young Max, to start worrying about your health when you were older was the thin end of the wedge, and meant you’d be in the croaker’s parlour every five minutes plucking prescriptions out of his hand, and swallowing pills by the bucketful. No, as far as he was concerned, he was going to go out the way he wanted, playing bridge, or after finishing off a perfect gin and tonic in the Three Tuns.

  Of course Waldo had known all this without being told, and as soon as he could had Lionel facing Gloria and her new escort, one Mr Derek Burt, across the Bexham bridge table, which was an excellent dry run for the real match, to which they were to drive, it now seemed, in Waldo’s spanking new Aston Martin DB4 convertible.

  Lionel walked round the car, first this way, and then that, admiring it in silence. Finally he spoke.

  ‘Pity you got rid of the Jag, though. I was very fond of that car.’

  Waldo smiled, at the same time opening the passenger door for the older man. He knew this was in the way of being a rebuke for his extravagance, and couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘Haven’t got rid of it, Lionel. No, I’ve mothballed the Jag for young Max, for his twenty-fifth birthday, if he can afford it. Told him so too, thought it might make him work harder at not being out of work.’

  ‘You spoil that boy,’ Lionel grumbled, but he smiled and touched his white moustache lightly before settling back in his seat. Waldo’s having no children of his own was a great advantage, and Lionel would be a fool not to know it.

  They sped along the long country road that was taking them to their game, feeling pleasantly nervous, and pleasantly excited at the same time. The challenge match was to take place at a large Regency house owned by a certain Philip Basnett, and when Lionel saw how elegant it was, and how perfectly set out the gardens and grounds, how the door was opened to them by a liveried servant, he found himself feeling distinctly pleased that they had driven up to the place in such a dazzling motor car. It then occurred to him that such was Waldo’s pride in their partnership, and knowing him as he did now, he would not have put it past him to have bought the car for no better reason than to give them both the sort of confidence necessary to drive up to such a spread, with victory very much in mind.

  Philip Basnett was a short, stocky man in his early forties. The fact that he was nominally patrician was in no way evident in his demeanour, which was full of the swagger and indifference to others which comes from inheriting a large fortune, too young. It seemed that Basnett had inherited steel much as some people inherit money, and now played with the vast income that it had afforded him, investing in everything from antiquities to fine art, and acquiring houses in the same way that other people bought clothes. He also loved to gamble.

  Most unfortunately for all those who disliked him to about the same extent that he adored himself, he was instantly successful in everything he did. He had developed winning systems at the baize tables, and on the racecourse, so tha
t while his investments went to fuel his indulgences, his indulgences also proved more than lucrative. Had he had even a half acceptable personality to go with these gifts he would have been one of the toasts of the town, but the man with everything also lacked everything. As far as good looks or good manners, or even social graces, went, from the moment that Philip Basnett introduced himself it became abundantly evident that he made up for everything he owned by lacking everything that everyone else would wish for him.

  ‘Good evening, good evening.’

  He smiled thinly at Waldo and Lionel who’d been ushered into the drawing room while a servant offered them both a choice of drinks from silver tray.

  ‘Have you seen my Canalettos?’

  Waldo looked momentarily taken aback, knowing that this was not the English way. The English hated anyone to mention their possessions, and would never dream of drawing attention to them. It was a rule.

  ‘I have,’ Lionel chipped in to Waldo’s amusement as Basnett stared at him, frowning. ‘In my book on Canaletto. Seen them all, so not to worry showing us, eh? Good stuff, of course, but we’re here to play, aren’t we?’ he ended, looking at Waldo, all innocence.

  ‘Yes, as my partner says, we’re here to play,’ Waldo agreed.

  Basnett looked momentarily affronted, but within a few seconds had regathered his odious personality.

  ‘Quite so, quite so,’ he said, after a short pause. ‘Your reputation precedes you, Mr Astley,’ he droned in his carefully constructed voice. ‘One hears you are considered to be quite simply the tops.’

  ‘All depends on who’s doing the considering, Mr Basnett.’

  ‘Let us find out the truth in the rumour, shall we? If I have a target in my sights, I like to shoot.’ He smiled round at various of his other guests who were within earshot, and reassured by their polite smiles he pulled at his bow tie, tightening it in such a way as to make him look over-groomed. ‘Yes, I like to shoot, all right,’ he said again.

  ‘Just what my friend Mr Hemingway always said.’ Waldo smiled.