The Wind Off the Sea

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Yes,’ she announced suddenly, to the two men’s surprise. ‘I think you’re right, Peter. I think we should accept Mr Astley’s very kind offer.’

  ‘You will?’ Waldo’s face lit up with a mix of genuine relief and pleasure. ‘You really will?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. I can’t see any reason why not to.’

  She wanted to ask him why. Very badly she wanted to ask why he was singling them out to help, why her and Peter and no-one else in the village. There were other deserving cases he could have considered, some perhaps even more deserving than their own, yet he had picked them, and Rusty was curious to know why. Yet she dared not ask just in case she might learn something that would quite spoil the pleasure and excitement of the moment, or, even worse, something that might jeopardise their whole future, that might be so dreadful that they would not be able to take up his offer after all and would be forced to go back, cap in hand to her mother and father, to live with them once more in abject misery. So of course she didn’t ask the question. She simply affirmed her decision, thanked Mr Astley as best she could and stood aside while the two men talked through the fine details. And it was just as well she did. For by doing so, by remaining silent, she was able to see why Mr Astley was being so benevolent. It wasn’t that he felt sorry for them, although she was sure that might well have been the reason for his Christian behaviour the night she was caught in Mrs Morrison’s. No, it wasn’t pity at all. This time Mr Astley’s charity was motivated by something entirely different. Rusty saw it as she stood by watching the two men talk business, making plans and foreseeing their joint future. Mr Astley was doing what he was doing not because they were some deserving cause, but because, unlike her own father, Mr Waldo Astley believed in Peter.

  With this realisation came an enormous surge of relief. Rusty didn’t need any more pity. Rusty reckoned she had endured from certain people recently enough pity to keep her humble for the rest of her life. But now that Mr Waldo Astley believed in Peter enough not only to invest money in his enterprise and make him a business partner, but also to take on his once errant young wife as his housekeeper, she knew that she could rebuild her life, that she could pull her shoulders back to where they had been during the war, stand straight again and walk as tall as she should. She could look people in the eye again, rather than pass them by with her eyes on her feet, trying not to notice how they shook their heads sadly at her, at that poor Rusty Sykes who lost her baby and used to wander round half demented clutching a dolly, poor soul.

  Once everything had been agreed in principle, Waldo drove off in his beautiful, newly acquired Jaguar, a car that seemed to Rusty to have been tailor made for him, so well did it go with his flamboyant personality and extraordinary good looks. Rusty watched him drive away down the causeway that led back to the estuary road, the hood of the car down, the wind blowing through his thick dark hair, his famous hat chucked onto the back seat, with the sunlight dancing off the brightly polished chrome, and felt a sudden pang. His dash and his style, and above all his huge appetite for life itself, reminded her of the late Davey Kinnersley, Meggie Gore-Stewart’s great love, a passion Rusty had secretly shared. Rusty was reminded of how Mr Kinnersley would arrive back in Bexham aboard his yacht the Light Heart, standing at the helm with the wind off the sea blowing through his shock of fair hair, and how Rusty and her brothers would be there lined up on the quays to watch him, enthralled by his seemingly carefree manner, his style, and his dash. Rusty would have given anything she had to be seated in the passenger seat of the beautiful white sports car with Waldo Astley driving. To be driven away by him into the unknown would be like going to heaven. It would be like taking the open road leading only to unimaginable happiness and bliss.

  Instead he had left her another taste of paradise, the right to live in the lovely wing of Markers, to be a resident in one of Bexham’s most elegant of houses.

  ‘Do you ever wonder why he’s doing all this?’ Peter asked Rusty as they wandered back, towards the centre of the village. ‘Do you ever wonder why us?’

  ‘Course I do, Peter,’ Rusty replied. ‘All the time. It worried me at first – but now I know why, I’m not the least bothered by it no more.’ She picked up Tam and swung him onto her hip, walking along more jauntily than Peter had seen her move for weeks and months.

  Peter hesitated then hurried on after her, as best he could with his gammy leg. ‘Wait!’ he called. ‘Hey – wait for me, Rusty!’

  She waited, smiling happily to herself while Tam played around her feet, chasing a big coloured butterfly that was fluttering over the wild flowers along the verge.

  ‘What did you mean – now you know?’ Peter demanded, once he had caught up. ‘Now it doesn’t bother you any more. Why did he pick us?’

  ‘He didn’t, Pete,’ Rusty answered simply. ‘He didn’t pick us, love. He picked you.’

  * * *

  Waldo’s next port of call was Shelborne. He had telephoned Loopy earlier that morning to ask if he might pay her a visit because he had some important news for her, and after the briefest of hesitations Loopy had agreed to see him at lunchtime over a glass of sherry.

  ‘That’s one of the few drinks which I don’t enjoy, if you wouldn’t mind,’ Waldo said as he was offered a glass from a cut crystal decanter. ‘Once when I was at Harvard we were very bored, as students perpetually seem to be, even though they have everything at their feet, and I overindulged in dry sherry. I thought it was a nothing drink – the kind of drink you gave to your maiden aunts at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Next thing I knew was waking up in hospital. I actually don’t want a drink, to tell you the absolute truth. This is actually a business call, not a social one.’

  As Loopy smiled and poured herself a tonic water, as much to mark time as anything else, Waldo stroked her little dog’s head and noted with admiration how trim and lithe Loopy Tate’s figure still was.

  ‘Sure I can’t tempt you to something?’ she called from the other end of the room.

  ‘I can be tempted to most things, Mrs Tate, believe me – but not sherry wine.’

  ‘Yet so far no-one’s tempted you into marriage.’

  Loopy turned back to him and looked at him with a slight smile intended to hide her deliberate provocation. She was interested to note that for once Mr Waldo Astley was at a loss for words – but only temporarily.

  ‘If I were to be married, Mrs Tate, I would not want to be tempted into it. I’d really want to be married for love.’

  ‘How delightfully old-fashioned.’

  ‘Being a Southerner – like yourself, Mrs Tate – I declare some of the oldest fashions still to be the best.’

  ‘Then forgive my modern impertinence – and this is a lot to do with living in this country, particularly in these parts and at this time in our history – but given that there is generally a great shortage of eligible young men, I simply must know if you have ever been even close to what my husband calls the state of unholy deadlock.’

  Waldo laughed and shook his head. ‘I rather agree with whoever it was,’ he replied. ‘Voltaire, I think. That marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Present company excepted.’

  ‘Would you count your parents as cowards too, Mr Astley?’

  ‘Do you think you might call me by my first name? And I you by yours? After all, we are fellow Americans.’

  ‘But of course, Waldo. So, to get back to what we were saying—’

  ‘My parents were a classic case of two people marrying only to wake up the next morning and find they’d married someone else.’

  ‘If I get your drift,’ Loopy said, taking the easy chair opposite Waldo and indicating with an elegant hand that he should also sit down, ‘if I catch your drift, you’re saying your parents – what, didn’t know each other that well before they married?’

  ‘I have to wonder why you’re so curious not only about my marital or non-marital status but also about my family, Lo
opy,’ Waldo said with a smile, taking his cigar case from his inside pocket as he saw Loopy lighting herself a cigarette.

  ‘I’m a naturally curious person,’ Loopy replied, exhaling a long line of blue smoke. ‘Particularly about people who interest me.’

  ‘I’d far rather talk about your paintings than my parents, if it’s all the same to you, Loopy,’ Waldo replied as he cut the end of his cigar with a small silver implement. ‘And I’ve changed my mind about a drink, if that’s all right? No, don’t move – I’ll help myself if I may. Is that whisky in the other decanter?’

  ‘I have a terrible feeling they’re both sherry wine. One dry one sweet.’

  ‘Then I’ll have a pink gin, if it’s all the same to you. I’ve developed a bit of a taste for this most English of drinks.’

  Shaking a couple of drops of Angostura Bitters into a glass, Waldo swilled them round then tipped the remains into the fireplace before adding a generous amount of gin with a dash of water. As he prepared his drink Loopy smoked her cigarette, wondering privately why he seemed so unwilling to elaborate about his background. But she knew better than to ask further. She had been far too well brought up not to recognise the fine line between polite curiosity and impolite nosiness.

  ‘I have some rather exciting news for you,’ Waldo announced, as he sat back down once again. ‘I find it so, at least, and I sincerely hope you do as well. Do you know of Richard Oliver, the art dealer?’ Loopy nodded and frowned. ‘Richard’s a good friend of mine. His gallery did some business on behalf of my father some years ago in New York – or rather his late father who was running the Oliver Gallery then did, and his son and I became friends. Whenever Richard was in New York, he and I played a lot of cards together, drank a lot of whisky and listened to a lot of jazz. But to cut to the chase, I showed him the four small pictures you kindly allowed me to borrow and he demands to see more. I mean demands. He was suggesting he might come down here, to see the body of your work – but I sense that might prove difficult.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Loopy protested. ‘They’re my paintings and surely I can show them to whomsoever I choose.’

  ‘I seem to remember you had a certain amount of difficulty showing them to me.’

  ‘This is different. This is business.’

  ‘Excellent. I’m glad to hear such determination,’ Waldo replied. ‘Now of course you know what this could mean? If Richard gives you an exhibition, your whole life could change – and that might not be quite as convenient as it sounds.’

  Waldo smiled at Loopy but she just nodded, anxious for him to proceed.

  ‘You might become not just successful, but famous. And because of that, you might want to think about it some. It opens up all kinds of maybes. So you might want to think about it, because once you’ve opened Pandora’s box, afterwards is way too late.’

  ‘I shan’t become famous, don’t worry. If my work is any good I might become moderately well known, but I shall eschew fame. It really would not suit me. But as for something changing my life, why not?’ Loopy smiled and shrugged. ‘Look – I’ve lived my whole adult life at the disposal of other people – to me the most important people in the world, namely my family – waiting on them, worrying over them, thinking only of them, but that part of my life is over now. So I really have no intention of remaining at their beck and call for what’s left. It wouldn’t be good for them, and it would be even worse for me. And even if the absurd did happen and I became monumentally famous, it’s a little late for me to have my head turned. I’m getting too old for that.’

  ‘OK! That’s settled then,’ Waldo said cheerily, draining his glass and standing up. ‘No more talk of you getting spoiled by the trappings of fame – we shall stick strictly to business. Richard is genuinely very excited by your work, just on the evidence of those four small pictures. He feels you have an original talent, and after all that is what art is all about – producing something unique and original. But I have to say here, I can’t understand why none of them hang in the house. I do find that odd.’

  ‘Let’s just say Hugh finds my colours too bright for his taste.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s something that husbands do? And fathers as well? I sometimes think it’s because they feel it distracts from them. Why do so many male birds have brighter feathers than female birds? So that the males can strut and show off, and no-one will even notice the poor old drab female behind them. The male sex are born show-offs, Loopy, believe me. Nature has given us a love for centre stage and we don’t like relinquishing it.’

  ‘Does the same thing go for you, Waldo? Do you like to strut?’

  ‘You are looking at the prime example, my dear Mrs Tate, believe me.’

  ‘Good. Then I insist you stay to luncheon and expound your theory some more, so that I shall be able the better to handle my husband on his return. Come on, Beanie,’ she called to her little dog. ‘We shall eat al fresco.’

  They sat out on the terrace eating a sardine salad dressed with a strange mayonnaise Gwen had invented during the war and to which she had become oddly addicted, but since both Loopy and Waldo were far more interested in their conversation the state of the salad dressing was by the by.

  What was not by the by was that it seemed that Loopy really was going to be invited to have an exhibition at a famous London West End gallery. But however much Waldo kept insisting it was true, the more he did so the more impossible the notion seemed, particularly since if the show was in any way successful it very well might establish Loopy as a professional artist. As she listened to Waldo expound, Loopy couldn’t help imagining the reaction of her family and friends, and wondering what on earth they would make of it. Not even her children had ever bothered to comment on their mother’s ‘daubs’. As far as they were concerned Loopy’s paintings were just the reason she was often late for dinner, or was forever catching them up when they went out for a walk on the Downs. Not one of them had ever considered her paintings might possibly have some merit.

  ‘So what’s the next step, Waldo?’ Loopy enquired as he prepared to take his leave of her. ‘Will young Mr Oliver really come to visit?’

  ‘I really think he will,’ Waldo replied. ‘Unlike a lot of gallery owners, Dick likes to come to artists’ studios himself. Doesn’t send a subordinate; he comes in person. That way he gets a much better feel for their work. He’ll go anywhere in search of fine art, sometimes to the most outlandish places. He really is very dedicated.’

  Picking up the large straw panama hat that he now always wore during the heat of the day in place of his slouch hat, Waldo smiled in farewell and made for the door.

  ‘I wonder why,’ Loopy said quietly, as she opened the front door for her guest.

  ‘I just told you, Loopy. Because Dick really is one dedicated fellow.’

  ‘I meant why me? I meant I was wondering why you have spent all this time and bother on me. Is this something you do? Find artists for your friend Richard? Or is there some other reason you’re taking all this trouble?’

  Waldo looked at her carefully, then at his hat, on whose perfectly clean brim he seemed suddenly to find some small traces of lint which he carefully picked off. Finally he put his hat in his other hand, preparatory to donning it, and cocked his head to one side as he looked back at the beautiful woman standing before him.

  ‘No, Mrs Tate,’ he said slowly. ‘No, this is not something I do. This isn’t something I do at all. In fact this is something I have never done before. So why you? Why not you? Why not ask yourself that? Why not you?’

  With an enigmatic look, Waldo gave a smile and a small bow before donning his hat and departing, leaving Loopy with an almost irresistible urge to pull an infuriated face behind his back. Instead she went back inside, changed her dress – for reasons she knew not – dotted some scent on the inside of each wrist and in the centre of her neck and suddenly smiled happily at her image in her dressing glass.

  ‘I am going to be famous,’ she told herself. ‘I am goin
g to become a painter of some renown.’

  She had already decided to take a walk down by the estuary and was about to put Beanie on his lead when she thought better of it, remembering how the little dog had suffered in the heat the last time she took him out in the afternoon. So with another pat to his fond little head she left him in the cool of the kitchen and took herself out the back door.

  She had meant to take her sketchpad with her, but the heat had become so oppressive that she decided if she sat somewhere to draw she would simply frazzle in temperatures that must by now be well in the nineties. So armed only and very sensibly with her parasol she was wandering along the path beside the water in the direction of the quays, meaning to stop and sit for a while on the jetty when she got there before returning home via the lane that ran past the church and back round the top of the village, when suddenly she saw her husband’s car.

  At least at first sight she thought she saw the big black Humber, before realising she could not possibly have done so because Hugh was still in London and not returning as always until Friday evening. So cupping a hand over her eyes to protect them from the sun into which she was looking, she stared across the estuary again to make sure she was right and that she was in fact not seeing things.

  There was a car and the car was large and black, of that there was no mistake. It was driving west, on the road on the far side of the estuary, heading for the abandoned boatyard on the promontory that lay beyond Markers, Waldo’s new house. From such a distance it was impossible for Loopy to clearly identify the vehicle, yet something told her it was their car, not just because it was the only one of its sort in the neighbourhood, because such a car might easily belong to some incoming stranger or visitor, but because of the way it was being driven. Why she could identify their car for such an absurd reason Loopy had absolutely no idea, yet she was convinced enough to hurry to the quay and to pay one of the boatmen to ferry her across the stretch of water which was now at high tide.