The Wind Off the Sea

by Charlotte Bingham

  Also by the Author

  CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS

  LUCINDA

  CORONET AMONG THE GRASS

  THE BUSINESS

  IN SUNSHINE OR IN SHADOW

  STARDUST

  NANNY

  CHANGE OF HEART

  GRAND AFFAIR

  LOVE SONG

  THE KISSING GARDEN

  THE BLUE NOTE

  SUMMERTIME

  DISTANT MUSIC

  THE MAGIC HOUR

  FRIDAY'S GIRL

  OUT OF THE BLUE

  IN DISTANT FIELDS

  THE WHITE MARRIAGE

  GOODNIGHT SWEETHEART

  THE ENCHANTED

  THE LAND OF SUMMER

  THE DAISY CLUB

  The Belgravia series

  BELGRAVIA

  COUNTRY LIFE

  AT HOME

  BY INVITATION

  The Nightingale series

  TO HEAR A NIGHTINGALE

  THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS

  The Debutantes series

  DEBUTANTES

  THE SEASON

  The Eden series

  DAUGHTERS OF EDEN

  THE HOUSE OF FLOWERS

  The Bexham trilogy

  THE CHESTNUT TREE

  THE WIND OFF THE SEA

  THE MOON AT MIDNIGHT

  Novels with Terence Brady

  VICTORIA

  VICTORIA AND COMPANY

  ROSE'S STORY

  YES HONESTLY

  Television Drama Series with Terence Brady

  TAKE THREE GIRLS

  UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

  THOMAS AND SARAH

  NANNY

  FOREVER GREEN

  Television Comedy Series with Terence Brady

  NO HONESTLY

  YES HONESTLY

  PIG IN THE MIDDLE

  OH MADELINE! (USA)

  FATHER MATTHEW'S DAUGHTER

  Television Plays with Terence Brady

  MAKING THE PLAY

  SUCH A SMALL WORLD

  ONE OF THE FAMILY

  Films with Terence Brady

  LOVE WITH A PERFECT STRANGER

  MAGIC MOMENT

  Stage Plays with Terence Brady

  I WISH I WISH

  THE SHELL SEEKERS

  (adaptation from the novel by Rosamunde Pilcher)

  BELOW STAIRS

  For more information on Charlotte Bingham and her books,

  see her website at www.charlottebingham.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Charlotte Bingham

  Copyright

  The Wind Off The Sea

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409057574

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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  a division of The Random House Group Ltd

  RANDOM HOUSE AUSTRALIA (PTY) LTD

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  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  RANDOM HOUSE NEW ZEALAND LTD

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  RANDOM HOUSE SOUTH AFRICA (PTY) LTD

  Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa

  Published 2003 by Doubleday

  a division of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Charlotte Bingham 2003

  The right of Charlotte Bingham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 0385 602855

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  THE WIND

  OFF THE SEA

  Charlotte Bingham

  Prologue

  When they all looked back on that time, it was as though he had come into their lives like the wind off the sea. It was as if, without realising it, he had determined to draw their thoughts away from the dreary toil of their days, from the heartache caused by relationships for ever stilled, from the destruction that still sat around in awful witness to the past conflict.

  As the winter wind moaned around their houses and cottages, and they sighed at their memories, staring into smouldering fires and looking back to happier times, he seemed somehow to have strolled into their lives, bringing with him not just the promise of spring, but the certainty of summer warmth.

  With his arrival they started looking up to that far distant line known as the horizon, looking towards a future which, although it might be stormy, would be far from grey. Naturally – and there can be no guilt attached to them because we are all the same – no-one thought of the effect they might be having on him, as people don’t when someone fascinates them.

  Nor did anyone fall to wondering why he was there, what ghost he might have come to lay, or what mystery might be strong enough to have drawn him back to the beautiful old harbourside village that faced the English Channel.

  WINTER 1947

  Chapter One

  The frost had lain heavy on the latch when Mr Todd had made to leave the cottage with his grandson Tam, making it unusually difficult to open the planked wooden door with hands already half frozen. The weather had turned so cold that water had frozen inside the window panes, while outside Tam and his grandfather could see icicles hanging from the guttering as thick as a man’s fingers. When the door had finally been prised open the first thing the little boy saw was a big black bird dead on its back on the hard white ground, its clawed feet thrust skywards as if in one last protest. His grandfather picked the poor little corpse up, and chucked it away without ceremony into a nearby ditch.

  ‘The rats can have him. No good comes of seeing dead crows,’ he muttered, half burying his face in his thick grey muffler as the east wind bit into his skin. ‘Dead crow in the morning always comes with a warning.’

  The little boy by his side said nothing. He knew that his grandfather was right: even the rats needed feeding in a winter as cold and hard as this one. The bitterness of the weather made him feel as though life was on the verge of stopping, that it would just get colder and colder until nothing could survive, until everything and everybody was dead, frozen stiff beneath one huge sheet of ice.

  ‘Don’t know what we’s bothering to come out for, Tam,’ his granddad muttered o
n. ‘Ground’s that frozen we’d need a pickaxe to get anything out of it. A pickaxe, or a ruddy pneumatic drill.’

  The wind sharpened as they reached the end of the lane and turned into the road leading to the allotments. Mr Todd hunched his shoulders tightly together and buried his chin further in his muffler while Tam gasped out loud as the ice-cold blast seemed to hit the back of his throat.

  ‘Think it’ll snow now, Grandpa?’ he cried bravely, as tears of cold trickled down his cheeks. ‘Must snow soon, surely, Grandpa?’

  ‘Too cold for snow, Tam. Far too cold for snow.’

  ‘How can it be too cold to snow, Grandpa?’

  ‘’Cos the clouds freeze up, that’s a why, boy. And the snow can’t fall out, that’s a why.’

  The two of them continued on their way in silence, as silent as the frozen countryside around them.

  ‘Can’t remember when I last seen the estuary froze over, and that’s true,’ Mr Todd said, gazing out to sea and suddenly flapping his arms round his body in a hopeless attempt to gain some warmth. ‘They say sea’s froze too, to a quarter a mile out.’

  His grandson frowned, staring in the direction of the sea, wondering whether he dare ask to be taken to see the boats glued into the ice, the snow carpeting the boatyard. But his grandfather always liked to do the suggesting; he knew that, as so he should. His grandmother had told him often enough.

  You best leave any ideas you have well alone, she’d say, ruffling his hair, which Tam hated. Your granddad’s sort of man who’ll run in the opposite direction you tell him, just for the sake of it. So you just leave any suggesting things to him.

  Hardly daring to breathe in or out now, so painful did it seem to have become, Tam wished with all his heart that he was back at home with his granny, huddled over the few lumps of coke and half-dry driftwood that afforded them the only warmth available in this most bitter of winters, rather than trying to curry favour with his granddad by agreeing to accompany him to the allotments to see if there was any food that they could dig up out of the unyielding ground.

  ‘Don’t know why we bothered fighting damn war,’ he heard his grandfather mutter as they reached their destination.’You can bet Jerry isn’t half freezin’ to death on a diet of tinned snoek – nastiest tasting fish ever put on a plate is snoek – or trying to dig a frozen turnip out of the ice. Makes a man wonder what it was all about, it does really.’

  ‘What what was all about, Grandpa? An’ who’s Jerry?’

  ‘Never you mind, young Tam,’ Mr Todd told him, with a sudden deep sigh. ‘That’s all a dead and buried now. ’At’s all a dead and a buried now, and that’s for sure.’

  As if to amplify his point, he undid the spade he had strapped to his back and started to try to prise some turnips out of ground that had seemingly turned to stone. As he did so, it began to snow. Five minutes later the two of them could barely see each other, let alone the vegetable patch, so thick was the blizzard. Finally Tam heard his grandfather throwing down his spade.

  ‘’Tis bloody hopeless,’ he swore. ‘Completely bloody hopeless.’

  Mrs Todd glanced at the clock and, seeing it was five minutes after the time her husband had said he would be back, immediately began worrying; it was that same worrying that had driven Mr Todd half to distraction during their long marriage. But it was something she couldn’t help – born with a frown, as her own mother had frequently told her. Never seen such an anxious child. Little wonder, however, that the poor woman did worry. Born into the kind of poverty that her marriage did nothing to alleviate, she hardly had two pennies to rub together for the first few years with her new husband. Perhaps lack of money had brought on her miscarriages, for they followed each other so regularly that it seemed she would never have a living child. Finally, Rusty, her first live child, was born, followed by the two boys. Now there were only Rusty and Mickey left to her – Tom, her elder son, having been killed on a rescue mission to Dunkirk.

  With a deep sigh, Mrs Todd pulled another thick knit cardigan on over her first one and knelt down at the grate to attend to the vaguely smouldering fire. She worried that her husband and young Tam would be frozen stiff by the time they returned from what she knew must be going to prove to be a fruitless quest. She stared furiously at the few remaining miserable lumps of coke that were refusing to ignite and the lumps of driftwood that were too green even to hold a spark. She had to warm the house somehow, if only for poor little Tam. She just had to warm the house.

  Desperate for warmth, and even more desperate to have some sort of welcoming fire going when her husband and grandson returned, Mrs Todd started to scour the house for something dry she could burn. She was so cold that for a moment she even found herself contemplating breaking up one of the kitchen chairs and throwing it into the grate. The truth was that had they been hers to burn, and not her husband’s property, she knew she could not have resisted the temptation. Instead she pulled her wardrobe away from the wall and prised up two of the short loose planks on which it stood in one corner of their bedroom. It wasn’t the first time she had been reduced to this desperate measure, and if the freezing weather continued she imagined that it wouldn’t be the last.

  Minutes later, the fire having leaped thankfully and cheerfully into life, she heard the outside latch rise and fall at long last.

  ‘Hang that soaking wet coat on the clothes horse, Grandpa,’ she called out to her husband as he ushered a half-frozen grandson into the room. ‘And for goodness’ sake sit you both down by the fire while I brew you some hot sweet tea.’

  ‘Hot maybe, sweet’ll be the day.’ Mr Todd winked at Tam who was too cold even to respond.

  As tea was being prepared Mr Todd rolled himself a cigarette that was nearly all paper and precious little tobacco while Tam went to fetch their precious mound of Swan Vestas, all of which had been cut neatly down the middle, such was the shortage of matches. The little boy reached forward eagerly to light his grandfather’s cigarette.

  ‘Now go and put a light on, lad,’ Mr Todd suggested, once his pipe was lit. ‘I know it’s not time yet, but five minutes one way or another won’t break the law, will it? No, well, I don’t rightly reckon it will.’

  Tam, a serious and dutiful expression on his young face, stood on the chair by the door, and pushed the light switch down. Just as solemnly he watched the low wattage bulb flicker into life, because he was not so old that it did not seem to be some sort of miracle how the turning of a switch could make a piece of glass light up.

  ‘Word is, on the wireless that is, it’s going to snow for a week or more,’ Mrs Todd said, as she put down her wooden tray, loaded with a teapot carefully covered with a cosy, and cups, their faces turned to their saucers, not to mention a precious jug of hot water, and a tiny jug of milk, on the table under the window. ‘I can’t remember a winter like it, I can’t really.’

  ‘How’s our Rusty?’ Mr Todd wondered, as his wife handed him a plate holding a slice of brown bread scraped lightly with margarine and a cup of steaming tea.

  ‘She’s lying in bed with a face as long as a wet week,’ Mrs Todd sniffed. ‘Peter’s gone to the garage, although I should imagine this weather’ll bring him home soon enough. No-one’s got any petrol coupons they want to waste in this weather, and there’ll be no mending neither, I shouldn’t have thought, so much good it’ll do him, but gets him out and away from Rusty, so that’s something.’

  Mrs Todd sighed and shook her head slowly from side to side, which was enough to tell her husband what she was feeling. The Todds had been married long enough for Mr Todd to understand that the slow shaking of his wife’s head meant that their daughter was no better.

  ‘Mickey still in the churchyard?’

  ‘Can’t think why,’ Mrs Todd replied, sitting down to her own tea on the other side of the fireplace. ‘Ground’s like rock. Vicar says there’s that many funerals being delayed, but they can’t do a thing about it. Suppose they’re stockpiling them, back at the undertakers, poor souls. But it
doesn’t bear thinking about. They were saying in the village, people are being found all the time, all over the country, dead in doorways, frozen stiff – tramps mostly, mind. But not just tramps, waifs and strays too – and not only waifs and strays neither. Ex-servicemen too, standing about in this weather with trays of matches for sale, and after what they’ve done for their country. Makes you think.’

  ‘What can you say?’ Mr Todd sighed. ‘Risk your life for King and Country and come home to die from neglect in a doorway.’

  ‘It simply isn’t right. It just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘When did war ever make sense? That’s what I’d like to know. You tell me when a war ever made sense. I tell you, it never did.’

  Tam stared from one old face to another as they sighed and grumbled, wishing with all his heart that he could read the time. He knew his father came back at six o’clock every evening. He just didn’t know when six o’clock would come; soon he hoped, silently, swinging his legs slowly under him, as his grandmother switched on the wireless, and his grandfather held out his cup for more tea. He’d just like it to be really soon.

  As she lay in bed in the dark, Rusty could hear her parents’ voices floating up from down below. She had only just woken up from a sleep from which part of her wished that she had never woken, yet she knew exactly what time it was, without even having to look at the clock, because there was yellow in the white of the falling blizzard from the glow of the one dim bulb that lit teatime by the fireside downstairs. Despite the twilight falling beyond the window, however, she made no move to switch on the light by her bedside, perhaps because the coming darkness outside the window matched her feelings so precisely.

  In her imagination she could feel the warmth of her newborn baby lying in her arms, imagine the softness of the face held close to hers, see herself carefully folding the shawls around it to keep it snug. But although Peter had taken the precaution of heaping her bed with extra blankets and coats before leaving to go to his garage, she knew the room to be colder than it had ever been, for her baby was dead, and Mickey was down at the churchyard with it, and she imagined there would never be a day for the rest of her life when she didn’t think of it, wondering over and over why it had been taken from her.