The Moon At Midnight

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘You mean the new version of It’s A Wonderful Life? It’s A Terrible Life?’

  ‘If you like.’ Waldo smiled and lit his cigar, slowly and deliberately. ‘It won’t be long before there aren’t inns like this any more, believe me,’ he said, extinguishing his match with a wave. ‘All sorts of things will come to bear on places like this – all sorts of influences, alternatives, laws, you just wait and see. These big brewery chains buying everything up and making them all uniform. The independent British pub is a statement on your way of life, and if we don’t fight to keep them independent the future doesn’t bear thinking about. The village pub is the hub of its social life – you can’t imagine Bexham without this place.’

  ‘You don’t have to. This place would still be here.’

  ‘But not like this, Richards, and you know it. The Beast wants to turn it into an hotel – somewhere to house all these tourists he’s going to bring here. And with them will come gift shops and all those other tourist traps – and Bexham will no longer be Bexham. It will be dominated by one damn’ great long marina, with an ugly second rate hotel standing right here, and a mass of little box houses springing up everywhere.’

  ‘And you’re going to stop it.’

  ‘We all are, for God’s sake! It’s our duty to stop this kind of rail-roading tactic!’

  ‘I suppose it doesn’t occur to you that some people in Bexham might welcome that sort of change? A change that brings more trade and greater prosperity to an area that has after all relied on fishing for far too long?’

  Waldo looked at his old friend, pondering on what he had just said. Perhaps there was some truth in it – perhaps he really was fighting to preserve a place that was in dire need of change. Perhaps he was simply indulging himself? Most of all, perhaps he was trying to preserve Bexham simply for himself, to keep it as it had been when he had met and fallen in love with Meggie?

  Shortly afterwards he left the Three Tuns, walking slowly back to Cucklington House, deep in thought. He had already come to the conclusion that there was no point in spending Christmas at home. Better to be somewhere quite other, because Christmas could never be the same again once you lost the one person you loved. He would do the decent thing, and go away for Christmas, sitting quietly in the corner of some large, anonymous hotel, letting the world go by without him, carrying along with him the memory of the only Christmas he’d spent with Meggie, most especially since the only other person he had imagined he could spend this particular time with was on her way to Ireland, speeding through windswept glens and past cloud-topped mountains with her son in the back of the car singing happily at the top of his voice, the boot of the Riley packed with presents and her husband at the wheel, leading the singing.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Christmas passed, January blew by, February froze and March stormed in. A fortnight was all that was left to stump up the amounts still needed to buy Bishops Fields and the Yacht Club, Richards having already and finally more than happily accepted the gift of Mr Wesley Atloda, a gentleman whose real identity he promised Waldo most faithfully never to reveal, pretending instead that he was an old acquaintance from his days in service, a fellow servant of Portuguese extraction whose long-time master had finally fallen off the perch, leaving an unmentionable amount of money to his ever faithful butler, a man who had now, albeit somewhat late in life, become a keen entrepreneur and investor.

  So with the Three Tuns saved from the jaws of Martin Markham, and the board of directors of the Yacht Club refusing to bow to the pressures of Markham’s puppet chairman, and safe in the knowledge that the contract for Bishops Fields still remained to be agreed let alone signed, the committee were of one mind: all they needed now was another miracle.

  For Waldo Christmas had been less of a miracle and more in the nature of a disaster. He had chosen the wrong hotel, a place exaggeratedly called the Grand when all that was grand about it was the hauteur of the staff. As soon as he could get a flight, he took himself off to Paris for the New Year, staying with friends instead in the 16ième arrondissement, only to find when he arrived that the whole family had flu, to which he also succumbed. Struggling in poor shape back to England after a week spent in bed rather than in celebration, he found the weather so unwelcoming that he again took flight, this time to the Caribbean where an unfriendly hurricane took the roof off his hotel, and storms destroyed what was left of his holiday.

  So when he finally returned to Bexham in the middle of February he could not have cared less about the freezing conditions and the foot of snow that lay covering the ground. It was only what he had come to expect. Seated alone at Cucklington House in front of a roaring log fire, comfortable in his own home once more, it could have been hoped that he would have at last found some kind of tranquillity, and yet he had not. All he felt, day after day, was loss and regret.

  ‘What in God’s name am I going to do with the rest of my life?’ he wondered aloud, as he drew the drawing room curtains back and stood staring out at the frost already bleaching the grass. With the sky appearing to spread like some sort of sparkling dome above the still high water of the estuary, and the water below it reflecting its beauty, Bexham was surely, if not a heaven on earth, at the very least a haven.

  The truth was that there was only one person who would have missed him if he left Bexham, and she was gone.

  He turned and looked at the portrait of Meggie that hung over the fireplace. No sooner had they come together than she had been taken from him. He stood below the picture, looking up into eyes that always seemed to be looking into his, remembering what he had used to call her pilgrim soul, her easy, careless laugh, the rapture of her smile and the passion of her love.

  And as he did he knew that he must move on. But when he woke in the morning, and felt the sudden light of the sun on his face as it sprang at him, spiralling up from the frosted garden below, it was as though he had felt the earth tip just slightly under his feet. It was as if it was spinning itself around towards spring, and as the world tilted, so too did the light change, and the very nature of that moment filled his heart with a rush of hope, just as it always did the moment he realised winter was over. The moment the faint thin light of February turned to the clearer, brighter light of March, bringing with it hares, high white scudding clouds, swaying daffodils, and the first sticky buds, and green came back to colour the dull grass, he once more believed in Eden.

  Soon there would be swallows, cuckoos, house martins, the lazy drone of bees, the bright green leaves on the beeches and blossom everywhere, white, pink, red and yellow, covering trees and shrubs, ready to turn to fruit later as the skies filled with summer visitors and gardens echoed to bird-song once more, instead of the hollow cawing of the big black birds of winter.

  He could not prevent his heart from lifting as he looked out on his fine garden, the pretty unspoiled harbour, the fishing boats setting out on the morning tide, the yachts bobbing on the deepwater moorings, seemingly as anxious for the arrival of spring as everyone awakening that fine March morning, and as his heart lifted Waldo saw that he had one more thing to accomplish before he left.

  It was Tam who was the harbinger and finally the redeemer, arriving as he did down to see his parents, back in England once more with The Bros to appear in what he happily described as a ‘junk heap of a film’ about some band on the run.

  ‘Another classic example of Swinging Sixties garbage,’ he told his mother, who was overjoyed to see him, because she realised that despite his huge success somehow Tam hadn’t allowed any of the things that were happening to change him. He was still Tam, but better.

  He brought Jenny back down to Bexham with him, having attended Jenny’s first lunchtime recital at the Wigmore Hall, through which she had sailed with satisfactory colours.

  They’d duly celebrated that night, and, as they danced once more at Number 28, despite her relief that her first concert was behind her Jenny couldn’t help wondering whether Tam was as nervous as she was about going
back to Bexham. The mutual conclusion was that since it was something they would both have to face sooner or later, much better to face it together.

  Even so, when Jenny and he eased themselves into the crowded saloon bar of the Three Tuns for a drink shortly after their arrival in Bexham and found that instead of being surrounded by the usual sea of happy faces they were marooned on an ocean of gloom, both of them thought that somehow the news of their new association had preceded them and this was their reception committee.

  There would seem to be good reason to believe this since even the ever-optimistic Waldo was sitting grim-faced in his usual seat in the window at a table that he was sharing with Jenny’s equally grim-faced grandparents, while her parents sat at the bar looking as if they were arranging each other’s funerals.

  No one noticed their entrance as the running conversation between the table in the window and the group round the bar continued.

  ‘So it’s a lot more serious than we thought?’ Hugh Tate was saying. ‘I don’t in all honesty see what we can do now – the whole thing’s out of our hands.’

  ‘Perhaps we should all sit round a table and make a new plan?’ Mattie suggested, her back to the door. ‘We still have time.’

  ‘I think Hugh and I should follow Waldo’s fine example in selling Cucklington, and sell Shelborne.’

  ‘Really, Loopy darling, what a whizzy idea,’ Hugh said, looking at her through weary eyes. ‘And where would that leave us? Can’t see where that’ll get us, not for the life of me.’

  ‘There’ll be no point in going on living here if we lose this one, Hugh, so to my way of thinking we might as well sell the house.’

  Mattie, suddenly catching a look in John’s eyes, turned round on her bar stool and following his gaze spotted Tam and Jenny still standing in the shadows by the door.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ she exclaimed, putting out her hands. ‘Look who it is! Jenny darling!’

  ‘Hallo, Mummy,’ Jenny said carefully, coming forward to kiss her mother while her father continued to stare past her at the figure behind her, still standing in the doorway.

  ‘Hallo, darling,’ Mattie said, returning the kiss. ‘And hallo . . . Tam.’

  Tam stepped out of the shadows and looked round the bar with a fixed smile.

  ‘Hi everyone,’ he said to a suddenly silenced room. ‘What can I get anyone? It must be my round, surely.’

  Before he could even reach into his pocket for his wallet, it seemed as if the whole of Bexham, and most of Jenny’s relations, had engulfed them.

  ‘Jenny, darling,’ Loopy said, getting up carefully and extending both her hands to her granddaughter. ‘I didn’t know you were expected. No one told us.’

  ‘It was a bit last minute, Grandma,’ Jenny replied. ‘Tam’s doing this film with the band, and he didn’t know whether or not they might be called.’

  ‘Jenny, my dear.’ Hugh beckoned Jenny over to his table, and she leaned over and kissed him, but his eyes were still fixed on Tam.

  ‘Hallo, sir,’ Tam said carefully. ‘May I buy you a drink?’ he added, glancing down at the older man’s empty glass.

  Hugh was about to shake his head.

  ‘Of course you can, Tam,’ Loopy put in quickly. ‘Hugh’ll have a whisky and soda – a lot of soda. And gins and tonics for Waldo and me, please.’

  Hugh said nothing, only nodded and took his old silver cigarette case out of his pocket, extracting a Senior Service which he carefully tapped on the case before putting it in his mouth and lighting it.

  Tam smiled, picked up some empty glasses and went to the bar to place his order.

  ‘How are you, Tam?’ Mattie asked. ‘We hear great things of the band – that you’re going from strength to strength.’

  ‘Their latest album went straight to number six in the States,’ Jenny announced proudly as Tam turned to John Tate.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink, sir?’

  ‘Thank you, Tam.’ John nodded, after a small pause. ‘I’ll have another pint if that’s all right. I’m drinking the Pedigree.’

  ‘Best draught in the South.’

  There was a small silence, while John searched around for something to say.

  ‘Oh, by the way, Tam. Congratulations on what you’ve done. Never thought little Bexham would throw up a famous pop star.’

  ‘Very kind of you,’ Tam replied modestly, ‘but it’s not really the case. I’m just the bass guitarist. Bass guitarists don’t get to be stars.’

  ‘Oh, come on, bro!’ Flavia, who had burst through the bar room door in time to overhear her brother’s modest statement, now hooted, throwing her arms round Tam’s back and pretending to try to lift him from the floor. ‘The Bros are only one of the biggest bands! And you’re a Bro, bro! Whether you dig it or not!’

  She let go of him, fished out a packet of cigarettes from her overcoat pocket and handed them round to anyone who wanted a smoke.

  ‘What was all the earnest discussion, Dad?’ Jenny wondered. ‘As we came in everyone looked so serious.’

  ‘It is pretty serious, Jenny. You know what’s been going on – with this awful man.’

  ‘You mean this guy who’s trying to buy up the place?’ Tam asked, taking the tin tray that held the senior Tates’ and Waldo’s drinks from the barman. ‘Is that still a big thing?’

  ‘Getting bigger by the minute,’ John Tate said, accepting his pint. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Tam returned. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  He took the tray over to the table by the window, Loopy and Waldo toasting his health and continued success while Hugh nodded, pretending momentary deafness.

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to him, Tam, he’ll come round,’ Loopy murmured.

  ‘Daddy was just saying,’ Jenny said, putting Tam back in the picture. ‘They’ve so nearly succeeded in saving Bexham, but because of—’

  ‘The time factor, mostly,’ John put in. ‘The whole business has been so protracted – which was in our favour at first. I mean that’s how this place was actually saved.’

  ‘This place? The Three Tuns was going to be bought up?’

  ‘Was very nearly bought up, Tam,’ Mattie said. ‘And guess who came to the rescue as usual? Our American knight on his great charger.’

  ‘So what’s gone wrong?’ Tam asked, looking round at Waldo who mock-bowed back to him. ‘I mean what else is at risk and why’s it all too late?’

  ‘The people who are selling Bishops Fields. This plot with planning permission for a housing development – they got fed up with The Beast—’

  ‘The man who’s trying to buy Bexham,’ Mattie explained. ‘We call him The Beast.’

  ‘Anyway, they got fed up with his prevarications, which we thought was good for us – only to find that when we tried to move in they’d jacked up the price.’

  ‘They maintained that so much time had passed since The Beast’s first offer that the value of the land had gone up that much, particularly with all the increased interest in Bexham,’ Waldo explained, joining the group. ‘So now there’s a shortfall. And there’s no good looking in this direction, because the cupboard is bare.’

  ‘No one’s looking at you, Waldo,’ Mattie said. ‘No one could have done more to help. Waldo’s even sold his house—’

  ‘You did what?’ Tam asked in amazement. ‘You sold Cucklington?’

  ‘Too big. It was just too big. Neil?’

  Waldo held up his glass to the barman. At that moment Walter and Judy appeared at the door and, seeing Tam and Jenny, went straight over.

  ‘We were just hearing of your problems, Mrs Tate,’ Tam said. ‘They say things have to get worse to get better, but I guess in this case you feel it’s gone far enough.’

  ‘I have to admit it could be better, Tam,’ Judy replied. ‘I mean for a moment this week we really did think we’d won the war, but no.’

  ‘How short is the shortfall, Waldo?’ Tam asked, discreetly taking Waldo aside.

  Waldo shrugge
d, before turning to look out of the pub window, down one of his favourite views of the quays and the waters of the harbour and the estuary, now at high tide.

  ‘Let us say, Tam, it’s big enough to be too big for me to throw it in, even if I could take any more out of the States, which I can’t.’

  ‘There could be a way,’ Tam said quietly. ‘There just might be.’

  Excusing himself, he went to the bar and asked if there was a telephone he could use. The barman was about to direct him to the public phone in the back bar when Richards beckoned to Tam.

  ‘You’ll stand a much better chance of hearing what the other person is saying if you go through there to the back room.’

  Tam stood in the back room, which was filled with crates of empty bottles, and yet more crates of full ones, and stared round him. He remembered being allowed to help Richards, sometimes, as a treat, when he was younger, and the excitement and mysteries that seemed to be part of backstage in a pub.

  The persistent ringing of his call must have woken Brewster Dysart because at long, long last Tam was privileged to hear a sound at the other end of the phone – a groan.

  ‘What do I want at this hour, Brewster? To bring you into the real world, which is filled with nasty guys who want to ruin my home town. It was my friend Max who first put me on to it, and now I realise how things stand.’ Sitting down in Richards’s swivel chair, Tam leaned forward until his head and the telephone receiver were practically between his knees, as if afraid someone might overhear, and began putting his proposal.

  ‘You’re mad,’ Hugh was saying to Walter, as Tam got through to London. ‘You must have drunk something very strange over in Ireland, that’s all I can say. You’re going to give up a thriving career at the Bar to build boats? You’ve gone barmy.’

  ‘Potty actually,’ Judy corrected her father-in-law. ‘What’s more, we’ve already made an offer for the boatyard.’