The Wind Off the Sea

by Charlotte Bingham

  Half frozen into imbecility they stopped off at Horsham and spent the rest of the night thawing out in the bedroom of a pub whose own temperature wasn’t that much above freezing point. The next morning they woke to bright sunshine and the start of a good thaw, conditions which while not making for carefree motoring did at least enable the benighted travellers to get to Bexham in time for lunch.

  Arriving home at last Hugh found Loopy still well wrapped up in her furs painting in the room upstairs that she had temporarily turned into her studio, the conservatory having proved far too cold in this coldest of cold winters.

  ‘I couldn’t resist it,’ she said, after welcoming him home. ‘It’s even freezing up here despite being so near the airing cupboard and all that heat that rises from the kitchen, but do look at this light. I mean look at that light over the sea, Hugh, doesn’t it take your breath away!’

  Hugh did indeed give it a cursory look, which was more than he afforded the canvas upon which his beloved wife was working, his mind directing itself with considerably more enthusiasm towards pouring himself an extra large gin and tonic.

  ‘How was London?’ Loopy called after him, as he headed back downstairs.

  ‘Very cold!’ Hugh called back. ‘Now don’t stay up there all day! I am absolutely starving!’

  But by the time Loopy came back to reality, tearing herself away from her intense painting session, she found Gwen had already served Hugh his lunch, quite alone, and having finished he had disappeared, in all probability to go for a walk.

  Hurrying to the dining room window, she saw her husband making his way as quickly as he could through the banks of snow that had blown up into frozen billows along the edge of the estuary. Grabbing her fur hat and gloves from the hall stand Loopy hurried after him as fast as she could, but she stumbled through the deep snow and fell hopelessly behind, and before long Hugh was gone from her sight.

  Following what she hoped were his footprints, which were fast disappearing under a fresh fall of snow, she finally reached the rise that led up to the headland. Looking up into the snowstorm she could just make out two figures, seemingly in conversation, and one of them she recognised quite definitely as being her husband.

  ‘Hugh?’ she called. ‘Hugh honey, wait, will you?’

  The snow thickened, swirling round her in the wind that was now getting up fast as the tide began its turn. For a moment she lost the figures entirely; then the knoll came into view again as the snow drifted in the other direction.

  But now there was only one man standing there, all alone. Hugh.

  ‘But I swear I saw two people,’ Loopy insisted as they made their way back home through the snow.

  ‘Me and my shadow, darling.’

  ‘Maybe I’m getting double vision in my old age.’

  ‘I could do with a double gin at mine.’

  ‘Hugh – it isn’t even teatime!’

  ‘Doesn’t stop a chap thinking ahead. In this weather all one can think of is the inner man. Makes petty bleak thinking, too, as a general rule.’

  ‘You sure you weren’t talking to someone, Hugh?’

  ‘Only the Spirit of Times Past.’

  ‘I definitely saw someone.’

  ‘Then you were definitely seeing things.’

  Hugh smiled round at her as if to reassure her. But Loopy knew that particular smile of old. It was the smile Hugh always employed when he was determined to get away with something.

  Chapter Three

  Judy put the tea tray down in front of Walter, who had fallen fast asleep in front of the fire and was now waking up pretending that he had only been daydreaming.

  ‘Tea. And honey sandwiches.’

  Walter rubbed his eyes and stared at the luxury on the plate Judy had placed on his knee.

  ‘Who have you been flirting with?’

  ‘Who do you think? Mr Bee the Bee-Keeper.’

  ‘Old Mr Adams gave you some honey?’

  ‘Old Mr Adams sold me some honey.’

  ‘It’s delicious, worth every penny,’ Walter told her, carefully eating a dripping honey sandwich.

  ‘In that case I can tell you how much I had to pay to Mr Bee the Bee-Keeper—’

  ‘No, no – it will only give me indigestion.’

  There was a small silence while Judy watched Walter eat all the sandwiches, one by one. Then, having sipped at her cup of tea, she said, ‘What I didn’t tell you, Walter, was—’ Judy was about to begin to embark on an account of her near miss with the car in the snow when she thought better of it. It was as if Mr Waldo Astley was her particular secret, and if she told Walter about him he would somehow vanish. Whatever the reason, she found herself changing tack in mid-stream. ‘What I didn’t tell you was Meggie’s back from America,’ she finished seamlessly.

  ‘You told me that on the telephone.’ Walter looked instantly bored, as he always did at the idea of having to listen to something twice.

  ‘Did I? I don’t think I did.’

  ‘Then I must have dreamed it.’ Walter took another sip of his tea.

  ‘I haven’t told you about our lunch,’ Judy continued, disregarding her near faux-pas. ‘Meggie told me all about her trip. It’s absolutely fascinating really – what America is actually like in comparison to us – to poor old us.’

  ‘Less of the poor old us. Gracious heavens, we won, didn’t we? That’s what counts – the fact we won. Whatever the cost now.’ Walter frowned, and turning pointedly away from his wife he picked up one of his law books.

  ‘That really wasn’t what Meggie and I were talking about actually, Walter. It was more to do with what you can get over there, what the general standard of living is like.’

  ‘Meggie was staying on Long Island, wasn’t she?’

  ‘And Newport.’

  ‘Quite.’ Walter yawned and turned the page of his book. ‘Wealthy parts of America. I dare say there were other parts where Meggie didn’t venture, where their standard of living wasn’t quite so hot.’

  ‘Yes. But that was really what I was going on to say. Meggie said she got the impression that over there you really feel that there hasn’t been a war, except in the films.’

  ‘As in Errol Flynn saving Burma single-handed.’

  ‘You should hear her talk about real coffee and butter and rolls,’ Judy continued, enviously. ‘And about Hershey bars and ice creams made with real cream.’

  Walter looked round at Judy, the longing in her voice getting to him in a way that nothing she had said previously had done.

  ‘I am trying to study, Judy – in case you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Judy replied and fell to silence. She would have liked to put the radio on, but knowing that too would disturb Walter, instead she lay back in her chair and stared round their little cottage sitting room. After listening to Meggie’s tales of America, it seemed to her that her own life was suddenly rather dull, even duller and certainly drabber than it had been before. In fact with a start she realised that what Meggie had said to her was right – she was missing the war. During the war she had known excitement and comradeship, she had witnessed heroism and self-sacrifice. But now the only thing to get excited about was the possibility of getting a new pair of nylons and the only sacrifice to be made the amount of black market butter one spread on one’s toast.

  Time passed, its only companion the sound of the still green wood burning miserably in the little fireplace. Nowadays Judy somewhat dreaded Walter coming home, because due to the size of the tiny cottage, and Walter’s need to spread out his law books on top of every conceivable available flat space, there seemed hardly the room for one person let alone two. Open books were everywhere, there was a pile of clothes that needed washing and ironing before Walter’s return to London first thing Monday morning, there were endless meals to be made and washed up and there were Walter’s other needs and desires to be taken care of. As always, after Saturday lunch while she was working her way through the mound of washing, besides worrying how muc
h the weekend would cost them, Judy also found herself wondering if this time her husband had at last made her pregnant.

  Not very romantic, she thought to herself as she began ironing. Not quite the way I imagined it somehow.

  A moment later Walter put his head round the door and announced he was going for a walk.

  ‘If you hang on ten minutes we could go together,’ Judy replied, carefully folding the sleeves of Walter’s best white shirt.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Walter replied, whistling to Hamish to come to him. ‘I have a lot of stuff to learn by heart, so it’s better I go off by myself. Won’t be long.’

  With Hamish safely on his tartan leather lead, Walter disappeared.

  Judy’s heart sank. Walter was now always taking himself off alone at weekends with only Hamish for company, to learn things by heart – things that Judy knew he could learn a whole lot quicker with her testing him as they always used to do when Walter first started studying for the Bar. But not any more. Every Saturday afternoon whatever the weather the front door would bang closed and Walter and Hamish would disappear out of her life for two – sometimes three – hours. And just as she always did, Judy watched him go from the small latticed window of the room she was in, head bent down, woollen muffler wrapped around his throat. She knew people would greet him as he passed them by and that he wouldn’t see them, so intent was he on staring at the ground with his head full of torts or whatever it was he was learning by heart at that moment, but no-one would mind he hadn’t acknowledged them because they were just so glad to see Walter Tate back. The only trouble was, Judy sighed as she dropped the curtain back down into place, that the Walter Tate walking on by with his eyes on the ground, the Walter Tate who had suddenly reappeared in their midst out of the blue, was not the same Walter Tate who had left Bexham when the war broke out, head held high, his blue eyes fixed firmly ahead.

  Even though the weather was still as bitter as ever, with the snow thick frozen on the ground, there was a good congregation for Matins in the village’s beautiful old Saxon church, albeit a well wrapped up one since the heating system had yet again packed up under the strain of more heavy use than it had seen in years. It was so cold inside the church that when everyone sang or prayed aloud it seemed as though the church was full of smokers, so long did their breath hang white and heavy on the air.

  However, the cold could not conceal the enthusiastic female interest in the stranger in the congregation’s midst. Waldo Astley had sat himself quietly down in a small pew in a side aisle, attracting attention before he had even bent his knee to pray, and he had been well and truly marked out long before the notes of the first hymn had faded and gone.

  Meggie, who had joined Judy and Walter in their pew, was one of the first to notice the American’s presence, nudging Judy gently before slowly rolling her eyes in the stranger’s direction.

  ‘Tall, dark, beautifully tailored and a total stranger,’ she whispered. ‘Is that the swine who so nearly snatched you from the bosom of your family?’

  ‘Later.’ Judy rolled her eyes towards Walter and then back to Meggie again.

  ‘He looks the hit and run type, and that’s without a motor car,’ Meggie went on, mischief in her eyes, her mouth pulled down mock-solemn.

  Mr Lowering, one of the churchwardens, half turned round from his seat in front of Meggie and knitted his thick, bushy eyebrows at her in disapproval. Meggie smiled brightly and mockingly back, then hugged her furs enthusiastically around her in an effort to retain as much body heat as she could for the rest of the service.

  In spite of the fact that it had begun to snow yet again, most of the unattached young women who had been kneeling in worship, as well as several of the older and very much attached ones, hung about as long as they dared, pretending their delay was caused by a pressing need to congratulate the Reverend Anderson on what was definitely one of his more tedious and long-winded sermons while waiting to see if the stranger in their midst was in fact known to anyone in the congregation. It seemed not, since Waldo wandered out of the old church all by himself, producing a silver cigarette case and a cigarette he proceeded to light with a Zippo lighter, much impressing the three teenage daughters of George the publican who like so many of their peers found anything even vaguely transatlantic utterly enthralling.

  ‘Guess who’s caused a flutter in the female dovecote, then?’ Meggie whispered to Judy, before deliberately sidling up behind the vicar to try to hear the conversation he was having with the American.

  ‘I found your sermon interesting, to say the least,’ Waldo was telling Mr Anderson, who was busily stamping his shoes on the ground in an effort to stop his chilblains from paining him. ‘Particularly your choice of text.’

  ‘Thank you, how very kind. Really most kind, most kind.’ The vicar’s lips were purple with cold, and on attempting a smile his upper lip seemed to have frozen to his lower lip.

  ‘It put me in mind of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy? The excellence of this text is that it will suit any sermon. And of this sermon that it will suit any text?’

  ‘One may prefer fresh eggs, sir, though laid from a fowl of the meanest understanding. But why fresh sermons?’

  ‘Very good,’ Waldo nodded. ‘George Eliot if I’m not mistaken. Although I must confess I would prefer no sermon whatsoever. I sometimes imagine Hell to be having to sit reading all the sermons ever preached here on earth – although the better part of my nature hopes that even Hell hasn’t come to that.’

  Waldo’s deep bass voice, a surprisingly rolling and mature sound from a young man, seemed to echo round the churchyard. Certainly it carried over to the rest of the congregation, who paused momentarily before hurrying on.

  ‘You are staying here in Bexham?’ the vicar enquired, as politely as he could. ‘Or perhaps just passing through?’

  ‘I had just come down for the weekend, Reverend. But you know I have taken such a liking to your parish that I am seriously considering renting somewhere here. Maybe even buying a house. Oh – an excellent choice of hymns, by the by. Good day to you.’

  Waldo touched the stylish black hat he was wearing half tilted over his brilliant dark eyes and strolled out of the snow-covered churchyard.

  ‘Well,’ Hugh said over lunch as the subject came up for discussion once again. ‘I suppose we’re only all still talking about it because it’s something someone should have said ages ago. I quite envied the fellow as it happens.’

  ‘So, you should have said something years ago, Hugh darling,’ Loopy chided him. ‘It’s not like you not to say something.’

  ‘Problem is I always fall asleep during the poor chap’s sermons, so I have no proper ammunition.’

  ‘By our pastor perplexed – how shall we determine?’ Walter rhymed. ‘Watch and pray says the text – go to sleep, says the sermon.’

  ‘Anon?’ his father queried.

  ‘Who else but good old anon?’ Walter laughed, raising his wine glass. ‘To good old anon – who says all the things we all wish we had said, sometimes even some of the things that we have said, and plenty of the things that ought to be said.’

  ‘Does anyone know anything about our mysterious visitor?’ Loopy wondered. ‘Surely someone has heard something on the grapevine.’

  ‘I think I was nearly run over by him,’ Judy suddenly admitted. ‘But only nearly,’ she continued, noticing Walter and Loopy of a sudden staring at her. ‘It was nothing. It was when I was walking back home after lunch with you on Friday, Loopy – a rather large car suddenly slithered right across the road. The next thing I knew it was coming straight for me.’

  ‘And Mr United States was the driver, was he?’ Walter asked, immediately bristling at the idea that someone had put Judy in danger.

  The expression in Walter’s eyes immediately induced Judy to quickly shake her head. ‘Heavens no! It wasn’t his fault. I slipped, and the next thing I knew this car was slewing towards me.’

  ‘And that fellow was driving, was he?’

&nbs
p; ‘I think so, I told you, I don’t know. I had to run after Hamish,’ Judy lied, wondering why she’d mentioned the incident at all.

  ‘I expect it was that fellow, and he was driving too fast. People coming from London always drive too fast. I bet he didn’t think twice about the speed he was doing.’

  ‘It was just a very slow skid, nothing important, really,’ she added quickly, afraid that Walter might make a fuss.

  ‘Oh, come, come, Judy!’ Hugh teased. ‘The sudden death of a house fly or the trapping of a mouse is a matter of enormous importance to the citizens of Bexham! Had you said something about it earlier, by now the story would have it that the handsome American was drunk in charge of a tank which he had commandeered during the war and it was only you throwing yourself under its tracks that saved Bexham from being razed to the ground by a maniac ex-GI.’

  ‘What had he done to go mad, do you reckon, Father?’ Walter wondered, joining in the fantasy and happily forgetting the incident. ‘Or, even better, what had driven him mad?’

  ‘Us winning the war, undoubtedly. He’s really a Nazi sympathiser who has been living undercover in Bexham, plotting an invasion that was to begin right here in Bexham Harbour.’

  ‘But they forgot all about him,’ Loopy joined in. ‘Hitler changed his plans but forgot to tell Mr United States, and he spent the rest of the war cooped up in Curley Sidelow’s Farm, eating faggots and lights.’

  ‘After that exchange with the vicar he’ll be lucky to be asked anywhere for faggots, or lights, for that matter. Hardly the thing, was it, criticising the sermon.’