The Moon At Midnight

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Flavia Sykes! Flavia Sykes!’ a woman’s voice close by called.

  Flavia immediately flattened herself against the bricks, taking instant advantage of a nearby jut in the wall.

  She didn’t know why she was doing it. It was just something she’d always done. The moment someone called her, she always hid.

  ‘Flavia Sykes!’

  The vendeuse, whom Flavia could now just see, strictly corseted and costumed in black, put her head once more out of the twin doors that led into the alleyway.

  Flavia heard the doors close behind the vendeuse again, and promptly stepped out of her niche and followed her into the back rooms that eventually led through to the front showroom, the catwalk, and all the other paraphernalia. She didn’t like working for someone else. She didn’t like the clothes she was about to have to hoof out in front of the dull, grey faces of the buyers, but she was at least in London.

  They put her in a grey flannel coat and skirt. Flavia stared.

  OK so it’s manky and boring, she told herself, so I’ll pretend it’s St Laurent!

  The curtain leading to the catwalk was flung aside. She was on her way.

  Rusty had left Bexham for her Bournemouth shop before he slipped from behind the wheel of his car to step out on to the quayside, ignoring the No Parking sign that had been painted on the stone in large, white letters.

  Of course he was aware of eyes watching him, but he made a practice of not noticing, for apart from anything else caring about what other people thought of him was not a preoccupation of his. A great many eyes were watching from the windows of the old inn that gave on to the harbour, but although he took this in, and enjoyed the attention, he never so much as glanced at them. After all, parking his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud always did attract crowds: gawpers, starers, minnows, people whom he took great pleasure in ignoring. Today he’d left his chauffeur in town, preferring to drive himself and his wife to what was, essentially, a private visit.

  A small boy sidled shyly up to him. Poorly dressed, his hair cut in the traditional pudding basin style of country village barbers everywhere, he smiled up at the man in the camel-hair coat smoking the large cigar.

  ‘Could I have your autograph, please, sir?’

  ‘And what would you want that for, sonny jim?’

  The small boy’s eyes drifted towards the large car and back to its expensively clad owner.

  ‘’Cos you’re a movie star?’

  The man laughed, and slowly took out a visiting card case, signing one of the cards with a silver Parker fountain pen, which he then replaced in his inside pocket.

  ‘There you are, sonny.’

  The boy stared at the signature, happy to be the owner of something so valuable, but before he could pocket the card a hand came out and seized him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him away.

  ‘What’ve I told you ’bout talking to strangers!’ The fisherman whose son it was looked down at the card before the boy could smuggle it into the pocket of his short trousers. ‘’Ere, you give me that.’ He stared at it, and then, turning back to the man still standing by his magnificent car, he very slowly and deliberately tore it up, allowing the small pieces to catch the wind and thereby be tossed eventually into the harbour waters.

  The visitor, watching all this, showed no emotion, but turned as the passenger door in the limousine opened and a small, blond woman in an overlarge mink coat emerged. She stood momentarily surveying the scene before her, and looking remarkably unimpressed.

  The fisherman stepped forward.

  ‘You can’t park ’ere,’ he informed the man as he locked up the Rolls-Royce.

  He turned and smiled. ‘As you can see, I am parked ’ere, as you call it.’

  The fisherman stared at him, dropped his eyes, and moved off, dragging his son after him, as Waldo turned from the window seat in the Three Tuns overlooking the harbour, drink in hand, cigar in the other.

  ‘I think you have a visitor, pal,’ he called to Richards, who was sitting up at the bar marking his racing selections for the day. ‘Looks like Mr Big has arrived.’

  Richards glanced over his half-moon spectacles, took them off, shut them, and slipped them into the top pocket of his immaculate blue sailing blazer.

  ‘In that case perhaps we should batten down all the hatches?’

  Waldo smiled. ‘Mmm. Might be a good idea, while you’re at it,’ he agreed, before lowering his voice. ‘Looks every inch what you would call a bounder, Richards.’

  The door at the top of the steps swung open and the visitors walked in, removing their top coats and strangely new gloves as they did so. They looked round as if expecting someone to take them, failing which they hung them up in the usual way on pegs by the door, and turned their attentions to the bar.

  ‘I’m looking for a Mr Richards.’

  There was a small pause before Richards nodded.

  ‘I am Mr Richards, sir.’

  ‘Ah. I’m Martin Markham, and this is my wife Mrs Markham.’

  Richards allowed another pause.

  ‘Ah, yes, that would follow,’ he said smoothly. ‘How do you do?’

  ‘Quite so.’ Markham nodded towards a back room. ‘I wonder if we could do business, Mr Richards, somewhere private?’

  He lit a cigar from a gold lighter and blew the smoke in leisurely fashion over Richards’s head before turning to the barman.

  ‘A glass of champagne for my wife, please.’

  Perhaps feeling Waldo looking at him from behind his newspaper, he turned and smiled at the man seated in the window overlooking the harbour. Waldo appeared not to notice, but, as he watched Richards preceding the newcomer into the back room behind the bar, in spite of the sunny day, the boats bobbing on the water, the bar filling up with locals, in spite of everything, he felt his heart sinking. He knew the rumours, he knew the facts, and now that he’d seen the man in person, he knew his enemy.

  At that moment Jenny was deep in conversation with her tutor at the Guildhall. The subject was her playing of Schubert’s Unfinished Sonata in E major. She had her hands on her lap, placed there like a pair of gloves, one hand on each knee, to stop them shaking.

  ‘You have improved.’

  Jenny knew this was about the best she could ever expect from Geoffrey Donaldson.

  ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Where did I go wrong?’

  The music teacher stared at her while at the same time thoughtfully pushing his spectacles up his nose. Normally he would lambast his pupils at every opportunity, but he knew that Jenny Tate had already been through overmuch in just one young lifetime. Rather than shake her confidence, he paused, thinking carefully, knowing that for some students one wrong word spelt the end.

  ‘Schubert has these quirky spacings, and figurations too – passages that can sound empty if the player is not up to them.’

  Jenny’s eyes were still fixed on her two carefully placed hands. She looked as if she might be praying, or meditating, but he knew she was listening hard, as hard as she seemed to like to push herself, never finding anything that she did quite right, always seeing the bad, never the good.

  ‘I thought so,’ she said quietly. ‘I made such a mess of that middle passage.’ She looked directly at him now. ‘Actually, I was thinking that it might be better if – if – well, if I stopped wasting your time, Mr Donaldson.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Please yourself, but what I was actually going to say was that you filled Schubert’s spaces more than adequately. Surprising really, particularly for someone of your slender experience.’ He always avoided any reference to age, as age never seemed to make much difference to musical depth. ‘The Andante for instance was filled with surprising energy and colour. Delicacy too. I quite liked it.’

  Jenny nodded, her eyes dropping to her hands stilled on her knees once again. Donaldson allowed a longer pause, staring at the music as if he himself was about to begin to play, knowing her as he was beginning to do.

 
‘I think I might be really too nervous to go on, Mr Donaldson,’ Jenny finally told him. ‘I will never perform well, I think we both know that. Never. I will always – I won’t be good enough.’

  Yet another long pause, after which Donaldson nodded.

  ‘Not to be nervous would be a great pity,’ he said evenly, frowning at something in the middle distance. ‘I know of an international soloist who used to get so transfixed with nerves he couldn’t get his hands off his knees. Once, in Russia, his hands stayed glued to his knees for quarter of an hour, until finally the audience started to throw things at him.’ He smiled. ‘You can imagine the scene – hats, gloves, sweet papers, in the hope of getting him to play. Fired up by being hit by their missiles he finally started to play the Schumann. You can imagine the poor old conductor waiting for it to happen – baton raised, baton down, baton raised again. At any rate, it didn’t matter. In the end he played so well, so brilliantly, that they wouldn’t let him go, a standing ovation, in fact. So, nerves are good, must have nerves, much better than not having any.’

  ‘Even so, I don’t think I’m cut out to be a concert pianist. I just want to play well, that’s all. Just.’ She paused. ‘Play well.’

  ‘Why not leave that, the performing side then, let’s say, to the fates? Now, much more important – do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘That would be lovely.’ Jenny looked surprised. Tea was not usually on offer.

  They sat together in a companionable silence drinking the tea the professor had brewed in a secretive sort of way in a small cupboard at the back of the room. It tasted strangely good to Jenny, exactly as tea had tasted after she’d had one of her many operations.

  ‘I myself had a bad time in Russia, once. The piano they’d supplied had freewheeling castors. You can imagine?’ Donaldson raised his hands and started to mimic himself trying to play at a disappearing keyboard, and Jenny started to laugh. ‘I spent the whole concert dashing after it, and no standing ovation at the end of that, I’m afraid! Just PA.’ As Jenny looked questioningly at him: ‘Polite Applause.’

  She laughed again and as she did so it seemed to the teacher that the few scars left on her face, minute but still visible, disappeared. The surgeons might have done their work, but he sensed that it was up to music to actually heal Jenny Tate, although because she gave not just all but everything to her playing, because she was hypercritical of herself, he knew that they would always be walking the high wire with her. That was OK. What he didn’t want was to be the cause of her falling off.

  ‘So.’ Donaldson took Jenny’s cup. ‘See you next week.’ As Jenny stood up and gathered her music together, he added, ‘And don’t forget to embrace your nerves. They are your blessings, you know, and definitely not in disguise. By the way, thought for the day.’ He waited until he held her interest. ‘Have you ever noticed that we always speak of composers in the present tense? Schubert does this, Chopin does that? As if they were alive today? That’s because they are, and always will be. Great art is always alive, so to be part of great art is to be permanently alive.’ He turned, still talking, and started to rearrange some papers. ‘When we play we become part of someone far greater than ourselves. That is one of the marvels about playing music, entering the soul of someone wondrous.’

  ‘I never thought of that.’

  ‘Good. I leave the idea with you.’

  Of course it might just have been Donaldson’s imagination, but as he watched the slim, navy-blue-skirted figure leaving the room to make way for his next pupil, it seemed to him that Jenny Tate had grown just a little taller.

  * * *

  Later Max picked Jenny up from college in his Mini Cooper. He was full of himself, or rather, as Jenny noted to him with light sarcasm, even more full of himself than was usual with Max.

  ‘I’ve only gone and landed a part in The Avengers,’ he told her exultantly. ‘In the hit TV series of all time! Well, maybe not of all time, but still The Avengers! Filming starts next week at Elstree. You are looking, my dear Jennifer Tate, at a future starker, a starker of all starkers! I am about to crack it.’

  Jenny, who was worried about the exam she faced in a fortnight’s time, tried to look both fascinated and impressed, and failed. Somehow music always seemed more important than acting.

  ‘I expect you’ll be going out to dinner to celebrate,’ she asked, trying to keep the hope from her voice.

  ‘Yes, and you’re coming.’

  ‘No. No, Max, really. I’ll only be a gooseberry with you and the face of Poppet Stockings.’

  ‘No, love, not. Patsy Gordon of Poppet Stockings has broken up with me.’ Max drew up at the traffic lights and shook his head woefully at Jenny while his eyes still sparkled with the marvel of having landed a plum part in a hit series. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Yes, that bastard David George, he only comes into the Thirty One Club while we’re having dinner, does the round of the tables, and only goes off with Patsy! I mean talk about hard-edged. Buys her a drink, chats her up, and voilà she’s gone from under my nose. Not that she wasn’t boring, poor Patsy, but boy, her legs! Let’s face it, though, you can’t have a good time with a pair of legs however long and brilliant. So, you’re coming out to dinner to celebrate with me tonight. We are going to have ourselves one helluva celebration, because, as Granddad always used to say, “there’s no taste in nothing”’

  The car moved swiftly forward, dodging in and out of the traffic, and as it did so Jenny found herself shutting her eyes, her head turned firmly away so that Max couldn’t see that she was still nervous in cars, still hated being driven.

  ‘Actually, Max, I really do have to go and practise at Teddy’s. I go there twice a week.’

  ‘Today is not that kind of day, Jenny.’ As Jenny turned and stared at him Max went on, ‘Today is B for Big Day For Max. You gotta come, that’s all there is to it. You gotta come and celebrate. Not to would be criminal, love.’

  Jenny turned and looked out of the back window. As she did so, her eye caught a piece of food half wrapped in a page of the Daily Mirror.

  ‘What on earth. . .’

  She picked up the piece of food.

  ‘That’s my breakfast, pay no attention. I just didn’t have time to finish it,’ he ended feebly, trying to keep his eyes on the road and away from Jenny’s horrified expression.

  ‘I don’t believe it, Max Eastcott! A green pea sandwich? I don’t believe what I see, truly I don’t. Green peas in a sandwich.’

  Max banged his wooden steering wheel lightly. ‘I know it sounds a funny mixture, green peas in a sandwich, but it can be very nourishing, at the right moment in the day, of course. Tell you what, let’s go and buy you a birthday present at Biba’s?’

  ‘It’s not my birthday, Max.’

  ‘Every day’s your birthday. I know, I’m your half-brother. That is what half-brothers know about, birthdays. I can just see you in one of Biba’s great purple hats with a long feather boa.’

  ‘No, thanks, really, Max. I’d rather go home and change if you don’t mind, if you’re serious about dinner, that is.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, let me at least buy you a hat. Everyone’s wearing hats out to dinner nowadays, it’s de rigueur, chérie!’

  Max stopped the car outside the shop.

  ‘You can’t stop here, Max, it’s double yellow lines.’

  Max stepped out of the car.

  ‘I won’t be a moment,’ he told her, bending down and talking to her through the car window. ‘Not a moment. Just sit behind the wheel, would you, oh and keep the engine running! We’re allowed five minutes to load and unload. OK?’

  Before Jenny could refuse Max had vanished inside the dark interior of the purple-painted shop, leaving Jenny in the Mini with the engine still running. After a few minutes of looking out anxiously for both policemen and traffic wardens Jenny spotted a policeman walking slowly and most deliberately towards the car, a sight which filled her with instant panic. Scrambling over the stubby little gear stick and sl
ipping into the driver’s seat, she tried to sit behind the steering wheel looking as casually relaxed as was possible. Two cars equally badly parked, but without anyone behind their steering wheels, were duly ticketed by the affable bobby, before he bent down to Jenny’s window and told her she’d better move on before she suffered the same fate.

  Jenny smiled at the policeman and swallowing hard put one very shaky hand on the short gear stick and pushed it forward while still attempting good humour.

  ‘Try using the clutch, miss,’ the policeman said, in a kindly tone. ‘It does help.’

  ‘The clutch, right, yes, sorry. Of course. Silly of me. My glasses, you know.’ She reached into her handbag, taking care to look vague.

  She had watched Max drive enough, she ought to know how to shove your foot down, and then put the stick into gear. Pressing the accelerator pedal once again she took her foot off the clutch and closed her eyes. The car shot violently forward in a series of terrible lurches, but somehow, heaven only knew how, and only heaven would ever know, failed to stall. Jenny at once saw trees rushing towards her, heard her own voice crying out to Tam, heard something else, and then nothing. She started to laugh. Perhaps to drown the sounds, perhaps because against all possibilities the Mini was inching slowly away from the Law, the pitching and heaving having ceased as she pressed slightly harder down on the accelerator, not too hard, just a little. Finally the little black and cream car proceeded evenly, cautiously, but proceeded none the less down the road, yard after yard, until finally the baffled policeman was less than a dot in her driving mirror.

  At that moment Max rushed out of Biba’s clutching various large bags, only to witness his car heading firmly towards the Kensington Odeon, watched by the tall policeman, who was slowly shaking his head.

  ‘Cor,’ Max said, delight and astonishment equally represented in his voice.

  ‘I know, sir, quite. How some of these girls ever pass their tests I don’t know. I think they asphyxiate the examiners with their perfumes. I mean, if you hadn’t seen it.’ He shook his head in amazement.