The Wind Off the Sea

by Charlotte Bingham

  Holding the little silver-framed photograph in one hand and forgetting all about the fire, Meggie sank down into the old chintz-covered armchair behind her as she continued to stare at her lost and much missed love.

  ‘Of course you’re dead,’ she told the photo. ‘You were drowned at sea, yet another dead hero, lost and gone for ever with no tombstone to speak of your passing, or mark your life.’

  Her grandmother had told her to wait until the war was over before marrying Davey. If they hurried into it Meggie might find she had made a mistake. Or Davey might discover the very same, she had warned. Once the war was over they might be different people, and she had advised Meggie to think of the consequences if they were married.

  But so what? Meggie now thought. Really, so what?

  So what if they had married and had made one huge colossal mistake – at least they’d have had some time together, be it only a few weeks, days or even hours. Instead, what remained of Davey lay somewhere on the bottom of the English Channel, while Meggie, who had so loved him from childhood onwards, sat alone, by an unlit fire, in a land impoverished by victory.

  If she had married Davey she would not have gone to France. She would have stayed at home in Bexham, married and safe, or safely married, and very likely a mother to Davey’s children by now. If she had married Davey she would never have allowed Judy’s father-in-law, Hugh, to encourage her to join SOE; she would never have been dropped into occupied France. She would never, through a combination of loneliness and necessity, have found herself first having an affair and even falling a little in love with Heinrich Von Hantzen, the German officer who had saved her from the Gestapo at terrible risk to himself.

  As the thought came to her Meggie glanced up at the chimneypiece, as if to assure herself there was no photograph of herself and her German lover there, so there could be no possible evidence of their affair. Now Heinrich too was dead, killed in action during the D-Day campaign as she had learned in a letter from his sister after the war had finished.

  My God, now she came to think of it, what would they have made of such an alliance here in Bexham? What would they make of it now?

  Realising it was not a thought that she had really faced up to before, in typical Meggie fashion Meggie suddenly found the whole notion quite hilarious. They would probably have shaved her head and paraded her in the streets with a billboard around her neck, and possibly they would still do the same if they should discover the truth. Certainly no-one would ever ask her to their houses again; she would be shunned by all, the lowest of the low. She would be that simply awful Meggie Gore-Stewart who all the time she was meant to be doing heroic things for her country was in fact sleeping with the enemy. Never mind that Heinrich was not a Nazi, never mind that he was a highly civilised, articulate and kind human being – the fact that Meggie had consorted with a German would banish her to Coventry for the rest of her life, at least as far as the folks of Bexham were concerned.

  A strange noise woke her out of her reverie, and looking round she saw the dreadfully bedraggled but all too familiar post-binge figure of Richards in his well worn tartan dressing gown and equally well worn grey winceyette pyjamas, with a pair of faded black slippers on his slowly shuffling feet. He was staggering into the dimly lit and freezing drawing room looking like something that not even a cat would bother to bring in.

  ‘It is I, Miss Megs,’ he announced shakily. ‘All but arisen from the grave.’

  ‘Looking at you as you are now, I’m not sure I agree about the all but, Richards, really I’m not,’ Meggie replied tartly, at once getting up and replacing the photograph she was still nursing, before Richards shuffled up the drawing room towards her. ‘Why don’t you wander off and find yourself something to eat, and try to sober up for what remains of the day.’

  ‘I do not require anything to eat, thank you, Miss Meggie. All I require is a pen and a fresh sheet of paper – and for good reason. I wish to sign the Pledge.’

  ‘I could repaper this room with the number of pieces of paper you’ve signed to that effect, Richards.’

  ‘This time I mean it, Miss Megs. I have visited Lethe’s portals and it was not an experience I would recommend even to my worst enemy, not even to Herr Adolph Hitler should he still be alive and in rude health somewhere.’

  Meggie smiled to herself as she watched Richards weave to the walnut bureau and search for pen and paper while gently but not altogether inaudibly moaning to himself yet more incantations about having visited Hades, but now having seen the Light.

  ‘When you’ve quite finished making your Pledge, Richards,’ she said, collecting her cigarettes and lighter and going to the door, ‘I’ll be in the kitchen, making you something a little more realistic.’

  However she couldn’t help feeling sorry for her wrecked butler, so much so that she decided to raid her emergency stores on his behalf. Her underground larder was a place she had somehow managed to keep undisclosed to anyone, most of all Richards. It was here that she kept a small supply of luxury provisions collected before her return from the States, and thereafter obtained via the black market, either from smugglers who ran the provender in from France, or simply from the fairly constant stream of spivs who passed through the village, stopping to make themselves known either at the Three Tuns, or at the grocery store. The few tins of veal, pâté and ham, the Belgian coffee and bars of Swiss chocolate, were all kept in top-secret storage under a thick stone slab in the floor of the cold room. Much as she longed to share Richards’s meal of ham on hot toast washed down with a huge mug of fresh black coffee, Meggie abstained from the luxury, allowing herself only one cup of coffee, albeit with brandy added, to go with yet another appetite-stunting cigarette. Meanwhile in front of her Richards was visibly, minute by minute, pulling himself together.

  ‘I don’t know about you, Miss Meggie,’ he said, once he’d wiped his plate clean with the last crust of bread. ‘But you can keep this post-war life for a game of soldiers.’

  ‘And I think I probably agree with yous, bedad and to be sure,’ Meggie agreed in a cod Irish accent. ‘So what’ll we do? What’ll we do? What’ll we do? To be sure, to be sure, to be sure?’

  ‘I have heard it rumoured upon the grapevine—’ Richards eyed her now with slightly less reddened and bleary eyes. ‘I have heard that the Three Tuns might be up for sale.’

  ‘I dare say. With your weakness, I would say you would be just the man to buy it, Richards. Talk about the perfect job.’

  ‘You may mock, and I cannot complain at your mockery – but I have been reliably informed that there is no better path to sobriety than to watch others getting regularly shipwrecked. If that doesn’t stop me from drinking then we must all sure as rationed eggs give up the ghost entirely.’

  ‘Does this mean I shall be losing you, Richards?’

  ‘One could hardly say you will be losing me, since no-one could say that I have been exactly present in recent times, Miss Megs.’

  ‘How could I manage without you?’ Meggie asked in all seriousness. ‘You and I are joined at the hip, like it or lump it, old thing.’

  ‘You will manage a whole lot better without me, dear.’ Richards suddenly sighed, losing all his former decorum. ‘The way I am at the moment, I’m just one great big waste of valuable space and time, and please do not try to convince moi otherwise.’

  Meggie smiled, although she did her best to hide her amusement, just the way she always did whenever Richards lapsed into what he called his theatrical.

  Buying the Three Tuns might not sound the most likely of salvations, but in an odd way she realised Richards might have a point – as he so often did. Immediately after the war there had been some talk of Richards’s taking over a small restaurant on the other side of the harbour, but for one reason and another his plans had come to nothing. Now, buying a pub might indeed be a kill or cure for her grandmother’s old butler; and besides, Meggie rather relished the thought of the more than theatrical Richards behind the somewhat stuffy
bar of their local hostelry. If that didn’t stir up the natives, she didn’t know what would, and for that reason alone it surely had to be a good idea.

  * * *

  It froze hard again that night, so hard that rumours abounded that out at sea the waves themselves were freezing, their white tops stilled into shapes resembling whipped white of egg as shipping all but ceased.

  Rusty, still clothed, lay silently in her bed once more. Downstairs her mother was listening to Children’s Hour on the radio with Tam. For a second or two Rusty thought she could hear Uncle Mac’s soothing voice floating up through the floorboards, but it did nothing to settle her. She closed her eyes and wished she could pray, but she couldn’t. It was as if she had fallen into a well of unhappiness and was slowly beginning to drown, no longer strong enough to tread the waters surrounding her. She had thought her walk with Jeannie might do her some good, blow away at least some of her black thoughts, and for a while it had indeed seemed to work. When she had been with Mattie and Max everything had been fine, momentarily. Even the incident with the snowballs and the name-calling had been galvanising rather than depressing. It was only when she had returned home again that the black clouds had descended once more.

  Why would her mother not allow her baby up here with her? Why did she insist that Rusty left Jeannie in the pram downstairs instead of letting Rusty have her upstairs in her bedroom so that she could cuddle her?

  It might have been different – in fact everything might have been different – if she’d had her own home, the way things were when Tam was born. Just her and the baby, that had been bliss, no-one nagging and carping, no-one to tell her what to do at all times of the day and night, just her and her baby. But then the war had ended, and the people who owned the house she had rented had needed to have it back, and what with money being so short Peter had suggested the best thing – in fact the only thing open to them – was to live with her parents, just until they got back on their feet, just for a few weeks. But the weeks had turned to months, and now they had been under the same roof for over two years with the result that they had no privacy and thus really no proper marriage. Worst of all, Mother had taken little Tam over, and since to her way of thinking nothing was good enough for her grandson, nothing being good enough was very bad for little Tam.

  Nor would Father hear a word said against the little boy. Everything Tam did was right and everything his parents did – particularly his mother – was wrong. Small wonder then that Peter was out all the time, seemingly caring less about his wife or what happened to her, not until the baby arrived that was. After that he was out even more. It was as if with the baby lost for ever Rusty had caught a highly infectious disease, something like tuberculosis. Peter seemed unable to come near her, apparently afraid that if he came too close he might catch her grief. So, kind man that he was, or that he used to be, he offered Rusty no shoulder for her to cry on and absolutely no moral support. As early as he could make it every morning he disappeared off to the garage where he remained working until long after his son’s bedtime and in turn that of his young wife.

  Rusty had to face the fact that at the moment Peter seemed more sorry for himself than he was for her. On top of everything he never once attempted to say anything to Mother in Rusty’s defence. He never contradicted her about the cause of their baby’s death, never said the baby didn’t die because Rusty helped you hang the curtains or we didn’t lose her because Rusty ran everywhere in the early months or because she might have eaten a green potato. Never once did he say the baby – our baby – she died, Mother-in-law, because the little thing had the cord round her neck, and that was all there was to it.

  Never the once.

  Never once did he leap to her defence. Instead all Peter could do was rush out of the house to try to mend the motorcars that people brought to him, and spend his day fiddling about in his garage, day after day, day after day.

  ‘Summer’ll soon be here, Rusty,’ was about all he could think of saying to her when he found Rusty yet again lying in a darkened room, trying to come to terms with her loss. ‘Soon as summer comes you’ll be feeling better, you mark my words.’

  But as she lay in her bedroom long after Peter had left for work it seemed that summer would never in fact come. All that happened was the weather worsened and with it so did Rusty’s state of mind. She would spend morning after morning lying in a ball under her covers, crying her eyes out while trying not to be heard by her mother as she went about her housework. She could just about handle the food shortages and the terrible grim and freezing weather, the lack of money and heating, the deprivations that seemed universal and wholesale, but what she couldn’t deal with was the lack of any love and compassion. She didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her – she just wanted some love and some tenderness. Instead of which all she got was blame and half-hidden accusations of wilful carelessness. She even began to consider the possibility that it might be her own fault, that whatever lay at her door did so because she had brought it there. Until they moved in with her parents she thought she had really loved Peter, but after two years under the same roof as her mother and father, Rusty had come to fear that she had only married Peter after the war out of pity rather than for love – and because of Tam, because she thought he should have a proper name like other boys, that she should give him a proper father, and that if she did that her child would be safe from taunts and insults. And when Peter had come home such a hero, albeit a hero minus a leg, out had come the village band to greet him, bright had shone the medals on his chest, and Rusty loved a hero as much as anyone, and so they had married.

  It had been so good at first, Peter proving to be as gentle and sweet as he had always been when they had all been growing up in Bexham. Neither had his wartime experiences, let alone the loss of his leg, seemed to have made him bitter. They were happy together, even when they’d moved back into the tiny house that had been her home – until they realised that with the loss of privacy came a loss of intimacy, not only physical but mental. Now this new loss, the major one, the tragic one. Rusty suspected that what she’d fallen in love with was the uniform, the heroism, rather than the man inside the uniform, because the man she now shared her life with showed no love for her, no compassion, not even a little tenderness.

  It’s not that I don’t love So-and-So, it’s just that I’m not in love with him. That was what Rusty used to hear girls in the wartime factory where she worked saying time and time again. She thought that was how it must be now with Peter. She did like Peter, even though he was so hopeless at dealing with her grief. She still liked him in spite of his inability to help her. In fact – she sat up as the thought occurred to her – in fact she liked Peter so much that the one thing she knew now was that she couldn’t possibly go on living with him. It just wouldn’t be fair.

  She became quite determined, now that she knew what was in her mind. Whatever happened, one way or the other, Rusty was now convinced that she had to go. Somehow she had to get out of this suffocating little cottage, get away from Mother and Father, and from a marriage which was little more than a friendship. She had to run away from home. She had to run away and leave it all behind her.

  But where was she to go? And when? It was all very well making these life-changing decisions as she lay in her bed upstairs while her husband worked all the hours God gave him to put food on the table, to clothe them somehow, and help her parents keep some sort of roof over their heads, but when it came down to practicalities a feeling of utter hopelessness came over Rusty, the same feeling that she used to have when she was little and realised that being a child was like being a prisoner. You were helpless, always waiting around for someone else to feed you or clothe you, quite unable to do anything for yourself. And that was just how she was beginning to feel again now.

  She was a prisoner once again, but this time she was incarcerated not by the helplessness of childhood but by her marriage vows.

  She climbed out of bed as quietly as she could
and carefully opened the door. The voices she could hear talking below were all coming from the kitchen, which would mean if she was very quiet – and very careful – she could get up and down the stairs without being heard.

  ‘Sshhh!’ Mrs Todd said suddenly, knitting needles held still in mid-air. ‘Thought I heard something.’

  They all listened, Mr Todd, his wife and their son-in-law Peter, but the house was completely silent.

  ‘Probably just them floorboards again,’ Mr Todd said, resuming his reading of the single sheet of print that nowadays represented the local newspaper. ‘Creak as if they’ve a life of their own so they do.’

  ‘Could be Rusty.’

  ‘Don’t think so, Mother-in-law. She was fast asleep when I looked in. Out to the world.’

  ‘State of mind she’s in she could walk in her sleep,’ Mrs Todd said, picking up the stitch she had dropped. ‘Time she pulled herself together. Which is why I did what I did.’

  ‘What was that, Mother-in-law? What did you have to do?’

  ‘Nothing that need concern you, Peter,’ Mrs Todd replied, with a sharp look. ‘Least not unless you want that wife of yours locked away.’

  She gave one last glance towards the closed door but the house had once more fallen completely silent, the only noise to be heard being the moan of the winter wind outside, the rattle of the windows.

  On the other side of the door, still as a mouse, Rusty stood on the bottom stair, her eyes on the pram by the door, the little pram with the pink blanket still pulled up into place. All she had to do was wait, take a deep breath, tiptoe over to the pram, take Jeannie and tiptoe back upstairs. That’s all she had to do to be safe, and since she had got down here without anyone noticing, she surely could get back upstairs. As soon as she could, she would wrap Jeannie up in her warmest clothes, then in the thick wool blanket, dress herself as warmly as possible, take the little money she had saved away in her purse under the mattress, climb out of her bedroom window on to the roof of the outhouse, drop down into the snow and be off. Where, she didn’t yet know, nor did she care. All she knew was that once she had Jeannie in her arms and was out of the house, she was safe. She had enough money to pay for several days’ food and lodgings somewhere – anywhere, as long as it was miles from Bexham – then once she was settled in her mind again, once everything was back to normal, she would get a job. She didn’t mind what she did, just so long as they didn’t mind her bringing Jeannie, and Jeannie’d be no trouble anyway. Jeannie was a good little girl. Jeannie would just lie there and sleep without making a sound until her mother had finished her work, and could take her home again. So now all she had to do was tiptoe over to the pram, pull the blanket back, lift Jeannie up and take her away with her.