The Moon At Midnight

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Hi, Jenny,’ Tam said awkwardly, he at least attempting some kind of bonhomie, however false. ‘Hi.’

  ‘You might have told me, Max,’ Jenny said, turning away from Tam. ‘That was the least you might have done.’

  ‘Before your recital?’ Max replied. ‘I don’t think that would have been very clever.’

  ‘You didn’t have to bring him.’

  ‘No. No, that’s perfectly true, I didn’t.’

  ‘Look,’ Tam interrupted. ‘It’s perfectly OK. I can just disappear.’

  ‘No you can’t,’ Max said, keeping a hold of him. ‘That isn’t going to solve anything.’

  ‘What are you trying to solve, I wonder?’ Jenny said with little interest, turning back to her looking glass to check her hair and then pick up her belongings from the tabletop.

  ‘I thought it might be – well – nice for you to see each other again,’ Max offered lamely.

  ‘OK,’ Jenny said, turning back and looking at Tam dispassionately. ‘So now we’ve seen each other – now that’s been achieved, I’m going home.’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift,’ Max said quickly. ‘The car’s just outside.’

  ‘I’d prefer to take a taxi.’

  ‘You can’t afford to take taxis, Jen.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Tam said, glancing daggers at Max. ‘I can take a taxi. OK? ‘Bye, Jen. And sorry – OK? It wasn’t my bright idea.’

  Tam turned and went, giving Max no chance of stopping him, hurrying down the corridor at a fast trot which turned into a run as he crossed the now deserted green room, along the corridors and out into the cool of the night air.

  For a moment he stopped to try to regroup, but his mind was still racing, just as his heart was still pounding as much from the emotional impact of the meeting as from his sudden sprint. It was just as he had imagined it would be, only much, much worse.

  In one of his many re-enactments of such a meeting Jenny had shouted and cursed him, and now that he had finally come face to face with her again how he wished that she had done. It would have been infinitely preferable to that terrible coldness. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, trying to expunge the image. He could still see the look on her face – and why not? he wondered to himself, as he began to walk down the street in search of a taxi. He shouldn’t be in the least surprised since it was exactly what he had expected.

  But it hadn’t been what he had hoped. Before he had returned to England, when he had thought about Jenny his hope had been that sooner or later some freak chance of circumstance would bring them together, and when it did, after an initial moment of discomfort and awkwardness, somehow a point of forgiveness would be reached and they would become friends. In his imagination he had always skirted over the exact logistics of this all-important moment. What had happened instead was that Jenny had looked at him as though she never wanted to see him again.

  And what made it infinitely worse was not what she obviously felt at that moment, but what he felt at that moment. It wasn’t fear – because all fear vanished the moment he looked into her eyes, and it wasn’t sadness, because a part of him had all at once felt uplifted; neither was it pity because when he looked at her he could hardly make out any scars on her lovely face, and nor was it remorse. It was a strange, unwarranted exhilaration, as if, having heard her artistry, he could not be as remorseful as he should be. As if, after all, something marvellously good had come out of the awful accident that he’d caused her, because, having put her months of acute suffering into her art, Jenny was now able to produce something that might almost turn out to be great.

  In time he caught a taxi, but not until after he had endured a long dismal walk made worse by the onset of rain. Having no raincoat he pulled the collar of his jacket up around his neck and looked round desperately for a taxi, sudden exhaustion adding to his inner misery. He fell asleep in the taxi when he finally caught one, drifting in and out of an uneasy slumber during which he dreamed that he was flying as a passenger in a private jet just like R.J.’s, only this one was being piloted by Jenny, who looked over her shoulder at him directly into his eyes with just the same expression she had shown in her dressing room before putting on a parachute, opening the door and jumping out, leaving him in an aircraft spinning helplessly out of control.

  He woke up with a startled yell just as the taxi was pulling up outside his hotel.

  ‘What’s the matter, mate?’ The taxi driver laughed at him through the open compartment window. ‘Incher never been in a cab before?’

  Whenever Judy collected Walter from the station she would become mesmerised by the sight of the wives who drove late and too fast into the station, their hair looking as if it had last been brushed with the pony’s curry comb, or tied up any old way under an old horse-festooned silk scarf. Drawing to a halt, usually under a No Parking sign, they would jump out of their wooden-sided estate cars and run towards the station buildings in jodhpurs and bedroom slippers, or sometimes slacks and evening shoes, an inevitable half-smoked tipped cigarette sticking out of the sides of their mouths. How Judy envied them their carefree, possibly careless attitudes to life, their husbands and children. She knew herself to be as different from them as it was possible to be.

  She would never meet the train without allowing at least ten minutes’ grace to pick Walter, or one of the children, up from the station. By the same token she would never arrive dressed less than immaculately, however old and pre-war her clothes, her hair newly shampooed, her make-up as perfect as possible, her nails freshly varnished. Lady Melton had been so strict with her, possibly because she was an only child. Judy had never been able to ignore what her mother always referred to as ‘the rules’. The rules governed Judy’s life.

  Just for that moment in London, though, she had forgotten the rules, and perhaps but for that chance – and it had been chance – meeting with Waldo, she might never have known how close she could come to actually breaking them. How easy it was to keep to your mooring when no other craft came near, but set up a storm, break your mooring and find yourself out in the wild sea, and you could forget what it was like to be in harbour.

  ‘Hallo, Walter.’

  Walter kissed her on the cheek. It was a little like a child’s kiss, half fond, half dutiful. Judy smiled. He put his weekend case in the boot, and she moved to the passenger seat as he took the wheel of the car, as he always did.

  She always tried to avoid saying ‘How was your week, darling?’, seeing it as most possibly being as irritating as saying to a child ‘I bet you’re looking forward to going back to school?’

  Tonight she glanced at him, once when he arrived and then again as she settled back into the passenger seat. First glance was always to see his expression, for she would know straight away whether or not he had won his case. Second glance tonight was to make sure that she was right, and he had lost his all-important case in the north.

  ‘Hubert rang just before I left,’ she said, over-brightly.

  ‘Did he just?’

  Walter always brightened at the idea of Hubert, just as he became gloomy at the mention of Kim’s name.

  ‘He’s having a grand time in Scotland with the Ogilvys. Fishing and walking, not too many mosquitoes. Food’s great. It’s a marvellous place. He wants to stay.’

  ‘Hubie wants to stay wherever he is. He’s that sort of chap.’ Walter smiled fondly. ‘Just such a shame about—’

  ‘I know, I know, but your mother says that if he doesn’t want to go to university, prefers to go into the City, much better to let him do just that. Loopy maintains that university is—’

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ Walter jammed the brakes on so suddenly at the traffic lights that Judy was flung forward, saving herself only with a swift hand to the dashboard. ‘Don’t tell me, Mother’s favourite subject – university is an indulgence. If you ask me I think she’s influenced Hubert against it.’

  Judy paused, taking a deep, inward breath.

  ‘No, Walter. What she says, actua
lly, is that university is a luxury, and that if Hubert wants to go into the City – that is, if he doesn’t get into the cricketing team at Oxford and feels he would just find himself marking time there, then that’s what he must do. And I agree with her.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘Not “of course”, Walter, but in this case I do.’

  Judy stared out of the passenger window, as she often did when Walter was driving, trying to suppress a strong desire to jump out and run off into the fields they were passing, run away from the endless torture that marriage sometimes seemed to inflict. Everything took such a toll: other people’s decisions, your children’s ideas about life, everything asking more of you than you sometimes felt you could possibly give.

  ‘Your mother and father’s cocktail party for the village is this evening. You know, their “Save Bexham Party”’

  ‘I can’t go, Judy. Really, I can’t.’

  Walter’s expression was so mulish she knew at once that he must have lost his case by a wide margin, that the man he had been defending had gone down by a great deal more than had seemed possible at the outset. It kept happening to him lately. She looked down at her gloved hands, knowing better than to argue with him.

  ‘I have so much work to do – you go.’

  Judy found herself making the shape of a church and its spire with her index and little fingers, and then turning her hands over and waggling her middle fingers – ‘open the doors and there’s the people’. It was what they had used to do at school when waiting to go in to see the headmistress. It was meant to calm their nerves.

  ‘What shall I tell Loopy and Hugh?’

  ‘They won’t even notice. Say I’m coming on later, I’ve been held up. By the time the party’s over they won’t remember whether I’ve been there or not.’

  There was a certain truth to this, which Judy had to accept. Nevertheless, as she walked ahead of Walter up to their front door, the front door that had been theirs for so long, the front door to the cottage that Loopy had found for them on the outbreak of war, it occurred to her that it was most unlike Walter to refuse to go to a cocktail party at Shelborne. He never missed a family occasion. He must know. He had to know.

  She dressed slowly and carefully, laying out her clothes on their bed, as her mother’s maid had used to do for her, before the war, when she was young and going to her first dances. Everything laid out in order of dressing, everything just so. Downstairs she could hear Walter had turned up the radio, some comedy programme that he always liked to listen to on Friday evenings when he came home. It was as if he wanted to drown the sounds of her dressing. Or perhaps, if she but knew it, he was trying to drown his feelings of jealousy and anger? Perhaps that was why he was refusing to go to his parents’ party, perhaps that was why he felt unable to face his mother when he knew what he knew about Judy?

  The truth was that ever since Flavia had slipped into her carriage on that late night train to Churchester, her imagination had been torturing her. Flavia, if she had seen anything that night, would surely have told Rusty? Everyone she knew must all now know how she felt about Waldo.

  ‘Do I have to go to the Tates’ this evening?’ Flavia groaned.

  ‘Yes, you do, and not for Bexham, for me.’

  Rusty appeared at her daughter’s bedroom door, brushing her thick auburn hair into an attractive shape in the nape of her neck and skilfully tying a large silk scarf around the result. She was wearing one of her own Laurel Cottage designs – a long black velvet skirt filleted with lace flounces, and a matching jacket with lace at the sleeve edges.

  ‘You look great, Rusty,’ Flavia told her, turning and smiling. ‘The look of the moment as modelled by Rusty Sykes.’

  Flavia had started to first name her mother when they’d thought it better not to let on to customers and business contacts that they were mother and daughter; and even though Flavia no longer worked with her mum she still first named her when they were alone. It put them on a one to one footing, letting them off playing their long-burnt-out roles of difficult daughter and long-suffering mother.

  ‘OK, boss, for you, but not for anyone else. I couldn’t care a fiddle about the Yacht Club, you know that.’

  ‘I know, but just don’t let anyone else know, for my sake. Promise?’

  ‘Sure.’ Flavia looked surprised at her mother’s sudden intensity.

  ‘Feelings are running high in Bexham, Flave. You know what that can be like in a small place.’

  ‘Sure,’ Flavia said again, as she snatched up her evening bag. Her skirt was about the same length as one of her mother’s handkerchiefs, but since she was wearing long suede boots the gap between the skirt’s hem and the top of her boots seemed almost decorous. ‘So, who else is going to be there, do you think?’

  Flavia followed Rusty down the stairs to the hall. Nowadays her mother smelt deliciously of French scent, and, more than that, looked amazing. She had no idea how, or indeed why, her father could have taken it into his head to go off to Australia leaving behind such a lovely woman, but then, thank God, that was none of her business, and never would be.

  ‘I think there’ll be the usual Bexhamites – the family, and, you know, Judy and Mattie and all of them, and then just about every member of the Yacht Club. Waldo Astley, everyone like that.’ Rusty tossed Flavia her car keys. ‘Come on, drive your poor old mother.’

  Flavia followed Rusty out to her new, flashy red convertible, and settled into the driver’s seat. She knew – because of Tam’s accident and all that – her mother always went out of her way to trust Flavia to drive her, which was flattering, and kind, but as it happened, this evening, Flavia didn’t particularly want to drive, but she also knew to refuse would be to hurt Rusty’s feelings in some indefinable way.

  ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you I saw what’s his name on Victoria station the other weekend.’ Flavia backed the car too quickly on to the road, not really checking whether anything was coming towards them.

  Rusty was so busy keeping her eyes firmly on the road she hardly heard her. ‘Who d’you say?’ she asked, vaguely, her hands tightening on her evening bag.

  ‘Yes, you know – what’s his name . . .’ Flavia clicked her tongue. ‘Yes, that friend of yours and Dad’s – Bruce Kingsley.’

  ‘Oh, Bruce.’

  Rusty sounded so disinterested Flavia immediately became suspicious, and glanced at her mother briefly.

  ‘He’s looking quite groovy for his age, bless him.’

  ‘Knowing our Brucie, I expect he was putting half Bexham on the late night train.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact he was. Half of a wedding party, it looked like, a ton of them.’

  Rusty still kept her eyes firmly ahead of her, at the same time struggling not to say ‘mind that van’ or ‘there’s a car coming out of that turning’.

  ‘It seems to me you can’t go anywhere without meeting someone from Bexham.’

  They drove on towards Shelborne, and had soon moved on to a much more interesting topic of conversation than Bruce Kingsley, namely the new collections, and the shocking price of crushed velvet.

  Loopy and Hugh looked at each other and then raised their glasses.

  ‘Here’s to Bexham, here’s to Shelborne, to everyone, but most of all tonight – beloved Bexham.’

  They sipped at their drinks and waited for Gwen to come to the door with the first of their guests. The marquee covering the garden was filled with warmth and flowers, with glasses and champagne, and halfway through the evening Loopy knew that Hugh would be inviting all their friends and acquaintances to make the same toast. Everyone was agreed, whether or not they were members, that the Yacht Club had to be saved from the man they had all now nicknamed The Beast and His Wife.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Bryn de Badout.’

  The first of the guests to arrive, the de Badouts, were practically founder members of the Yacht Club. Loopy hurried forward to greet them. They were only two of dozens of friends that she and Hugh had known ove
r many years, and in whose company they had delighted.

  ‘So good of you to come.’

  It would be the first of many times that Loopy would be saying as much, but she did not care if she wore herself to a shadow saying what she truly meant. Both she and Hugh felt passionately about Bexham, about the harbour, about the place where they had lived all their married life and where their children had grown up, where their grandchildren were now growing up. It was for places such as Bexham they had all fought the war. It was from Bexham that so many of them had sailed to Dunkirk to rescue their army. They were not going to give up Bexham for anyone or anything, let alone a man in a camel-hair coat and pigskin gloves who was convinced he could buy anyone.

  ‘Judy, darling. You look wonderful.’

  ‘Thank you, Loopy.’ Before Loopy could say any more Judy told her, ‘Walter’s coming along later, he’s been a bit delayed.

  ‘That’s Walter. He never stops, does he?’

  Loopy smiled at Judy, but her eyes had already passed on to greet the next group of guests as Judy moved off towards the marquee where Mattie and John were the first people to wave to her. Judy found herself shrinking from going over to them, but she went, finding when she did so not a shred of discomfort in their manner towards her, that is until Waldo arrived.

  ‘Oh look, Waldo’s here! Cooee, Mr Astley, over here!’ Mattie waved Waldo over, at the same time saying to Judy, ‘We must grab the old darling before everyone else does.’ She pulled Waldo over to John and Judy’s side, kissing him quite openly on the cheek, both arms round his neck in Mattie’s old enthusiastic manner. ‘I told Judy we were going to grab you before everyone else does,’ she said triumphantly to Waldo, ‘and we have!’

  Judy kissed Waldo just as enthusiastically, copying Mattie, putting both her arms round his neck, hoping against hope that by doing so she would allay all fears that he meant any more, or any less, to her than he meant to Mattie.

  Only surely Mattie’s heart couldn’t be beating quite as fast as Judy’s nor could she be feeling quite as faint, not outwardly faint, but that deep down faint that simply won’t go away.