The Wind Off the Sea

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I see.’ Waldo examined the end of his cigar now, as if that might provide him with a solution. ‘In that case we shall have to think of something else, won’t we, Mrs Rusty Sykes? And as it so happens, I think I have just actually thought of it. But I’m going to need your discretion in the matter.’ He gave a small cough, and stuck the unlit cigar back in his mouth.

  ‘Discretion?’ Rusty wrinkled her nose at him in bewilderment. ‘How do you mean my discretion, Mr Astley?’

  ‘What I mean is – to put it quite impolitely – I’m going to need you to keep that mouth of yours well and truly shut.’

  Rusty hesitated, looking suddenly thoughtful as Waldo glanced down at his watch, mindful of the fact that he hadn’t yet begun his packing.

  ‘You can do that for me, Rusty, can’t you?’

  ‘Course I can, Mr Astley. You know I can.’ She looked at Waldo directly in the eyes, her mouth set firmly. ‘You know you can trust me.’

  ‘I have no doubt about that, Rusty,’ he replied. ‘I never had.’

  Judy received one last visit from Waldo before he left for Germany. Not that Judy was aware of his destination, only that he was going to be away on business for a few days.

  But this time, instead of visiting her at Owl Cottage, he came to collect her in his Jaguar so that there was absolutely no chance at all that any of the curtain-twitchers down her lane could miss his call. Nor in fact that any Bexhamite could fail to spot them cruising round the village with the soft top down taking what looked like infinite pleasure in each other’s company.

  ‘You have yet to tell me whether or not this is having any effect,’ Waldo pointed out as he drove slowly round the streets of Bexham.

  ‘Whether what’s having any effect?’ Judy asked, nonplussed.

  ‘My role as Iago, of course.’

  ‘Oh. It’s hard to tell, really.’

  ‘I don’t see why. Either your husband is behaving differently to you or he’s not. Or – for instance – somebody might have said something to you?’ Waldo looked round at her. ‘Like that divine mother-in-law of yours. Has Loopy said anything to you about being careful whose company you keep, or anything like that?’

  ‘Loopy’s too wrapped up in her painting, particularly since the success of her exhibition. But anyway, even if anyone had said anything to Loopy, Loopy always makes a point of forgetting all about it, by-mistake-on-purpose. She’s neither a gossip nor a scold. But who knows? Maybe Walter has been told by someone about my being seen around with you because he keeps telephoning me during the week. Which is something he really never does. Then last week he brought me home the biggest bunch of flowers you’ve ever seen. Oh yes – then this week he rang up suddenly and said he’d decided to take me to dinner at the Savoy.’

  ‘And you say nothing’s different?’ Waldo laughed. ‘And are you going to go?’

  Judy turned and stared at Waldo for a brief second, and then redirected her gaze out of the car window.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Not necessarily. It’s not necessarily of course. Is it?’

  Judy gave a small sigh. Waldo had a way of putting his finger on everything and he was right as usual. When Walter had asked her, a part of her had wanted to say no – and she didn’t know why. A part of her didn’t want to go up to London on the train to meet Walter at the Savoy, and she knew now that the reason for her reluctance was sitting beside her in the driver’s seat. Compared to Waldo with all his electricity, his plans and daring, Walter now seemed faintly dull.

  ‘Yes, of course I want to go,’ she repeated. ‘Of course I do.’

  Whereupon Waldo stopped the car without any warning, the way a parent might when a child in its care was misbehaving and had to be reprimanded.

  ‘Right, it’s home truth time,’ Waldo said, perturbing Judy who glanced at him anxiously. ‘You think you’ve fallen in love with me when you’ve done nothing of the sort.’

  ‘How dare you?’ Judy gasped. ‘How dare you?’ Outraged, and without any good reason as she was well aware, she turned bright red and immediately looked away.

  ‘Just listen, and don’t get on a high horse,’ Waldo said. ‘You think that making yourself believe that you’ve fallen in love will somehow help mollify the pain you feel about Walter’s apparent indifference to you, other than simply wanting to have a child by you. But if you stop to think, this might be the only way Walter has of telling you that he loves you. I don’t think we can know what Walter has been through. Maybe it was so terrifying that he can’t even begin to speak about it because it might start to haunt him all over again. The terrible thing is you were separated for all those years when you should have been growing together as a couple but instead you spent them growing apart from each other. Then he comes home and you both expect it to be as it was – but that’s impossible. War changes people, particularly people as sensitive as Walter. What you were going to have to do when Walter suddenly reappeared back in your life was to start again, but you didn’t. You both started where you thought you had left off, which was really somewhere where neither of you had ever been.’

  Judy fell to a long and thoughtful silence. Two or three times she went to say something then thought better of it, remaining silent and wondering at everything Waldo had just told her. At last she took his hand and held it.

  ‘I should be angry, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘Why? Because you think I’ve been leading you on?’

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘There are all sorts of ways of arriving at the truth, Judy.’

  ‘I see that now. And thank you. I’ve been an idiot – only thinking of myself and not of Walter at all. This plan of yours to make Walter come to his senses by my appearing to flirt with you – it was just a smoke screen, wasn’t it? I’m the one you wanted to make see sense – yes?’

  ‘It’s a double-edged sword,’ Waldo replied. ‘Maybe Walter has to come to his senses, too. And maybe he will when the word gets about even more.’

  ‘About this?’

  ‘About you and me being seen together.’

  Waldo smiled at her. Then, starting the car up again, he turned its nose up a lane to a beauty spot high on the hills that overlooked the estuary and the headland. As he drove he continued to talk.

  ‘You haven’t had it easy, you know, either of you,’ he said. ‘Let’s face it – a husband who comes back to you after such a long absence, totally changed by experiences not of his choosing, must seem like a stranger.’ Judy said nothing to contradict this, so Waldo continued. ‘So to get back to your proposed dinner date – meeting him for dinner, where there are no distractions, where you have to concentrate on him and him alone, maybe it’s what you need. It could be a turning point. He might start to be able to talk, to be able to tell you things that he hasn’t been able to tell you before. He might – although I pray to God he doesn’t – he might even want to confess something to you, something shocking or terrifying, but something that might help you to understand you both better. Tell me – how many times have you and Walter been out to dinner alone since he came back? I don’t mean dinner parties – I mean out to dinner.’

  Judy thought for a moment. ‘Not once.’

  ‘I rest my case.’

  Waldo pulled the Jaguar off the lane and on to a track that led towards the clifftops.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Waldo?’ Judy suddenly asked as he was parking the car. ‘Why are you taking such a proprietary interest in Walter and me?’

  ‘Because I like you very much – both of you. Because maybe I wish I was Walter. Maybe John even, or Peter Sykes or your father-in-law – I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind being any of you.’

  ‘Don’t you like being you?’

  ‘I don’t think I know who I am. That’s the whole problem. Just don’t know.’

  Having reached the end of the track, Waldo pulled the car into the small clearing that served as a parking place. Swinging the low door open, he got quickly out of the Jaguar and
stood at the top of the hill looking out over the view, with the stiff sea breeze ruffling his thick dark hair. After a moment, Judy opened the passenger door and went to stand beside him.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk.’

  They walked along the clifftop path, the wind in their faces, and below them boats sailing on the white-capped blue sea.

  ‘Why did you come here, Waldo? Why did you come to Bexham?’ Judy asked after they had walked a good half-mile, and as she did so she wondered that she’d never thought to ask him before, so involved in her own muddled life had he become.

  ‘I had to, Judy,’ Waldo replied, still looking out to sea. ‘My father died last year when I was in Europe and I sailed back for his funeral. We were never close – in fact we didn’t get on at all, even though I was his only child, and that’s kind of odd, but there you are. He was a most unpleasant man by the time I got to know him, and by the time I’d got some polish and therefore could have been maybe a little more interesting to him, he went and died. It was very sudden. He was out riding his favourite horse, and he never came back. His horse did, but Pa didn’t. They found him up in the hills, dead from either a heart attack or a massive stroke.’

  ‘You’ve never mentioned your family before.’ Judy took a scarf out from her coat pocket and tied it in the wartime manner, knotting it on top of her head to keep out the wind.

  ‘For several reasons – the main one being I don’t really have a family. I had a father, but I never knew my mother. She gave birth to me, then left two days later.’ Waldo shrugged, sinking his hands deep in his pockets. ‘Possibly the problem was my father. He was a very hard and a somewhat bitter man – although why, God alone knows. He was absurdly rich and had everything most people want. Except the affection of others. He was, as I say, very rich and therefore very influential, but deeply, deeply unhappy. I don’t know what happened between him and my mother but all the time I was growing up she was never referred to, not once, by my father – and apart from me there was no visible trace of her ever having been in his life. He’d forbidden everyone in the household, everyone in his family, ever to mention her name, and my father being my father no-one questioned him. No-one disobeyed. It was the law.’

  ‘How on earth did you survive? More than that, how did you turn out so well?’

  ‘I don’t know about well – but thank you. As for how I survived, put that down to Bags. Bags – the greatest mammy in the world. Everything I am I owe to Bags. Bags was big – no, Bags was huge – she still is, God bless her. Bigger than ever. Bags is enormous, very black and very wonderful. She arrived the day my mother left because my father sacked everyone in the house who had worked for my mother, and he drove into town and came back with Bags, whose husband had worked for my father on his estate until he’d died in a lumber accident. Bags brought me up, loved me, took care of me, nursed me when I was sick, put up with me. Bags was my mother – and it was Bags who found out about my mother.’

  Judy took Waldo’s arm, holding onto him tightly as they negotiated the now narrowing coastal path cut into the side of the hill before turning and retracing their tracks.

  ‘Did Bags know your mother?’

  Waldo shook his head. ‘Like I said, by the time I was a teenager it was as if my mother had never existed. We lived a pretty peripatetic life – Carolina, New York, Monterey, Long Island, New England – and the more we moved about from one house to another the less connection there was with the past. The only link was Bags, and no – she’d never known my mother. She said that once in town, when she was young, she thought she’d caught sight of my mother in my father’s car – she had this vague picture of a beautiful blonde woman passing her by, waving at her and smiling, and that was that. Bags was only a kid then herself, you see. So my father and my mother must have been married for quite a few years before I was born, because Bags says she started work for my father, coincidentally, on the morning of her twentieth birthday and she thinks she was about fifteen when she saw my mother that once.’

  ‘So how did she find out about her? If she never knew her?’

  Waldo stopped for a while to take in the view of the blue sea that ran out it seemed to endless horizons.

  ‘My father kept her on after he’d sent me to Europe, which was odd since he hardly visited Carolina once I was gone, and once war had broken out. When I went back to America for his funeral – we buried him down South – Bags grabbed hold of me – literally, before we’d even buried Pa – and gave me an envelope containing a couple of photographs of someone Bags thought could be my mother. They were scorched, as if they’d been pulled from a fire.’

  ‘Where on earth did Bags find them?’

  ‘In a bedroom – or to be rather more precise in a bed. She had been told by my father’s land agent to get rid of any old bedding and mattresses and replace them because he was going to do some pretty elaborate entertaining back home due to the fact he was planning on running for Governor, so he was intending to refurbish the family home which had fallen into disrepair. When Bags was turning over an old mattress on the bed in one of the dressing rooms off the main bedroom—’

  ‘I like one of the dressing rooms.’ Judy laughed. ‘Must be some house.’

  ‘It’s a typical South Carolina mansion. Anyway, out of the mattress, through a hole someone had made in the side of it obviously to hide things – out fell this little package. Soon as Bags saw the contents she hid them away until she could get them to me, most of all because of what was written on the back.’

  ‘And what was written on the back?’

  ‘Well might you ask, Mrs Tate,’ Waldo replied, looking down at the little fishing port that lay far below them. ‘On the back of one of them – a photograph of a handsome young man and a stunningly beautiful young woman – was written in pencil – as clear as the day they were written – the words Bexham 1917’.

  Judy stared up at Waldo, but then something else caught her eye.

  ‘Heavens above!’ she exclaimed, looking over Waldo’s shoulder. ‘Here’s Walter.’

  ‘So what happened to you, Mr Know It All?’ Hugh wondered when he met Waldo at Northolt Aerodrome prior to Waldo’s departure for Germany.

  ‘Your son-in-law got hold of the wrong end of a stick.’ Waldo sighed, doing his best to keep his blackened eye wide open.

  ‘Knowing you I suspect that was rather what you wanted him to do.’

  ‘I could have just done with suspicions being raised, Captain Tate, not fists. Still, amazing what a good piece of black market beef will do.’

  ‘These should help you even more on your way,’ Hugh said, nodding to his aide who handed over to Waldo several large parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. ‘One thousand Lucky Strike, twenty-four pounds of coffee, twenty-four dozen eggs – so don’t go getting careless – and one thousand boxes of matches.’

  ‘Matches are in short supply now?’ Waldo exclaimed in surprise.

  ‘Sixty Deutschmarks a box. You should be able to buy a lot of information with that cargo – and here are the letters you have to post.’

  Hugh gave him a large white envelope that Waldo immediately slipped into his official-looking despatch case.

  ‘Bon voyage,’ Hugh said, shaking him by the hand. ‘Come to dinner when you get back.’

  ‘You bet,’ Waldo said. Then he took his leave and climbed up the steps at the side of the waiting Dakota to get on board.

  Hugh watched the plane taking off, and sighed.

  ‘Let’s hope all goes well,’ his companion volunteered brightly.

  Hugh shook his head. ‘Yes.’ He turned to the young officer still standing at his side watching the now airborne aeroplane. ‘Yes, let’s hope,’ he agreed. ‘Since Berlin is his destination, that’s all we can do.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Judy’s parents, Sir Arthur and Lady Melton, were away, and since Gardiner their old maid was too Judy had to check up on the house for them. She called up to Walter to tell
him where she was going and that she wouldn’t be long.

  ‘Wait for me!’ came the anxious reply. ‘Wait, Jude! I want to come with you!’

  Their evening out at the Savoy had been just the success Waldo had forecast. They had indeed discovered each other all over again. From the moment Judy stepped out of her taxi in evening dress to be met by Walter beautifully turned out in his white tie and tails, it was as if this was their first date. There had been no war, there was no hardship to endure and no personal misery or anxiety. They drank cocktails at the bar and dined at a table in a window overlooking the Thames, intoxicated by the magic of the moment. Judy had never seen Walter in such lighthearted spirits, not even when she had met him in those now distant days before the war. Somehow the times then had been so full of foreboding and the future so fraught with danger that it seemed as if they did not have time to laugh as they were laughing now, or to dance like they were dancing now, or even to flirt with each other the way they were flirting now.

  As they danced after dinner to the music of Porter and Gershwin Walter felt as if he was seeing the beautiful girl in his arms for the very first time, and it seemed as though all memories of the sinking of his submarine and the terrible subsequent days in Norway that turned into years of fighting for his life as well as the lives of his new comrades were expunged from his mind. It was as if a door down a long dark corridor in his mind suddenly banged shut, and when it did so Walter felt as though his whole heart had lightened and his eyes had grown suddenly bright.

  ‘I love you, do you know that?’ he whispered, kissing the soft curl of her hair just above her forehead. ‘I know I don’t tell you enough, but I love you just the same. You’re a wonderful, wonderful girl and I’m a lucky man.’

  ‘I love you too, Walter,’ Judy replied as he danced her slowly round the floor, which at that moment seemed to hang suspended somewhere in space. ‘I’ve loved you from the moment we met and I shall go on loving you for the rest of my life.’

  ‘I’m sorry about how I’ve been, Judy. I didn’t mean to be like that.’