The Wind Off the Sea

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘No. I shall be both the band and the singer, and we shall smooch. OK?’

  ‘Suits me.’

  Waldo opened his arms to her and took her in them. She felt as if she had always danced with him, it was that good a fit. He sang ‘The Nearness of You’ as they danced, and after that he hummed it. She held him and he held her and the room went round, and the world too.

  Later, as they undressed each other, she saw the wound in his shoulder. ‘How did it happen?’ she whispered, shocked.

  ‘Someone shot me. And missed,’ Waldo whispered back.

  ‘They didn’t miss. They hit you.’

  ‘They missed killing me. Sucks boo to them.’

  ‘Who wanted to kill you?’

  ‘One or the other. I don’t know. I was where I shouldn’t have been – which was where I should have been because I had to – and someone let someone else know, someone who shouldn’t have known – and the consequence was someone took a shot at me.’

  ‘Six inches lower. God, Waldo, another few inches.’ Meggie stared at the scar.

  ‘It didn’t happen, Meggie.’

  ‘And what about your face?’ She gently kissed the scar that ran down as it were through his eye. ‘What happened to this dear, beautiful face of yours? Was that a bullet, too? Looks more like a duelling scar. Have you been duelling in Germany?’

  Waldo laughed and kissed her right back. ‘No duel,’ he told her. ‘I was drunk – and walked into a glass door. In the hotel.’

  ‘You fool.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘What did you mean to do?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to do this, Meggie. But, boy, am I glad I am.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mean to do this, Waldo? You against this sort of thing?’

  ‘Not on political or religious grounds. No. Not on moral grounds either. When I say I didn’t mean it to happen – I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘He thought he saw an elephant, sitting on the stair.’

  ‘Would you be shocked to know that this is the first time?’

  ‘The first time what? That you’ve made love? Don’t tell me that!’

  ‘That I’ve been in love. I never thought I would fall in love. Now – come here, Miss Gore-Stewart, before I pass out from desire.’

  ‘Do you have the photographs with you?’ Meggie asked as they sat downstairs by the fire, much later, having a midnight feast from the tray Meggie had prepared for their dinner.

  ‘They’re at my house.’ Waldo drained the last of his champagne and stared at his glass with something close to regret.

  Having finished her food, Meggie suddenly longed for a cigarette, but resisted, in spite of knowing there was an emergency pack locked away in the desk. To distract herself she poured them both another half-glass of wine then turned the empty bottle on its head in the ice bucket. ‘So. There are just two. And that’s all you have to go on. Two snapshots and the words Bexham 1917 written on the back of one of them.’

  ‘Not a lot, is it?’ Waldo agreed, taking a cigar from his coat pocket.

  ‘And nobody has been able to help.’

  ‘It’s a long time ago now. Who’s alive who’s going to remember? I don’t even know what month the photographs were taken or where. I know that my father must have been here, because it’s his writing on the back. That’s all I do know.’

  ‘Maybe he had a relative here. He’d have to have some reason – because I’m absolutely sure there were very few Americans in 1917 who were choosing Bexham in little old West Sussex for their vacations. He must have known somebody here.’ Meggie wrinkled her nose and looked at him. ‘They must have had a love affair or he wouldn’t have tried to burn the photographs, or rather someone wouldn’t have tried to burn them.’

  ‘Then maybe it went wrong and left him the bitter man I came to know all too well? I always had the feeling that he had been happy once, but that it had ended suddenly. That happiness had been snatched away from him. That’s why I came here, just to see …’

  ‘Just to see?’ Meggie turned to look at him as he fell silent.

  ‘Just to see,’ he said again, and then finally smiling at her, ‘what would happen. And look what has happened. Like him, perhaps, I have fallen in love for the first time – in Bexham.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The van drove round to the tradesmen’s entrance at the back of the house, the delivery driver being familiar with the layout of Cucklington. He had brought the other consignments down from London when they were ready to be returned to their owner, a journey he enjoyed making not only because he himself had been brought up only ten miles from Bexham, but also because he had fallen in love with the owner of the house when he had made the first delivery. Indeed, as he opened the back of his smartly painted black and green van, he hoped and prayed it would be his heroine, Miss Gore-Stewart, who opened the door to him.

  And of course, since Richards had long since left to take up his duties as the landlord of the local public house, the delivery boy’s prayers were answered and Meggie opened the back door to him in person, dressed in a bright red wool dressing gown piped in white and red kid slippers, with her blond hair pulled tightly back and tied with black ribbon. Despite her early morning attire, to her little admirer she was still the most beautiful creature on whom he had ever set eyes.

  ‘Delivery from Barnstaple and Brown, miss,’ he stammered. ‘I understand you’re expecting it.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, in the excitement I had completely forgotten all about it,’ Meggie replied, examining the delivery chitty before staring back at him with clear blue eyes. ‘The excitement of Christmas, that is.’

  ‘Only three days to go now, miss. And, you know, I still get all excited like. Even though I know it’s daft.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s daft at all. I think it would be much more daft not to get excited about Christmas. Now, if you wouldn’t mind carrying that through to the hall for me and unpacking it, I’ll get you some refreshments.’

  The delivery boy took the wooden crate through as directed, easing off the nailed planks of softwood with a screwdriver he kept in his pocket and carefully removing the newspaper that his employers had rolled into balls as a means of insulation and protection for the cargo. Finally and with even greater care he removed the painting from the case, picked off a couple of flakes of newspaper from the frame, and stood it up against the side of a large armchair that stood by the fireplace in the hall to await its owner’s return.

  Meggie was back moments later with a tray bearing a mug of hot tea and a plate of hot buttered toast in a muffin dish that she set down on the hall table before standing back to appraise her restored painting.

  ‘Yes, that is brilliant,’ she said finally. ‘I’m always a little frightened about having paintings repaired when they’ve been damaged, but they really have done a brilliant job. And now – thanks to the sale of the house – I don’t have to get rid of it. It can come with me wherever I go.’

  ‘Mr Barnstaple said he thinks it’s one of the best Herbert Wilkinsons he’s seen for a long time,’ the delivery boy offered.

  ‘He didn’t paint a lot of portraits, apparently,’ Meggie said, staring at the painting with her head on one side. ‘Wilkinson was mostly known for his landscapes, so they tell me. Now. Now all we have to do is find a new home for it.’

  Had the painting been hanging where it had hung before, Waldo would have seen it the moment he walked in the front door. As it was, Meggie had decided to hang it in the library above her writing desk, and because of this Waldo didn’t see it until he had poured them both a drink in the drawing room. He was about to produce the photographs that he had gone home to collect, when Meggie took him by the hand and led him towards the library.

  ‘I want you to see something first,’ she said. ‘One of my favourite paintings has come home. It got damaged about nine months ago – fell off the wall – and I got it back this morning.’ She threw open the library door. ‘I bet like me you�
��ll find it rather special.’

  Meggie preceded him into the room, but as she turned to see his reaction she saw Waldo was already transfixed.

  ‘Good heavens above, Waldo,’ she said, hurrying back to him. ‘Waldo, whatever is the matter with you?’

  ‘You won’t believe this, Meggie, but the woman in this painting is the woman in my photographs.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to disappoint you, Mr Astley, but my mother could not possibly have been your mother,’ Meggie teased him after they had sat trying to puzzle it all out.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Waldo said, still worried, and not entirely convinced. ‘She could have got pregnant, returned to America, had me—’

  ‘Waldo?’ Meggie smiled at him, shutting him up as she did so. ‘Pipe down, and listen. My mother and father got married in 1918, after the war was over. The women in the photograph and in this portrait do look a little alike, I agree, but only because they are costumed in dresses and hats of the period.’

  ‘No, no, I won’t have it, he cried! I insist my father came here, fell in love with your mother, and we’re really brother and sister. Our romance is doomed, and we will have to go to the vicar to be shriven.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Now there’s a notion.’ Meggie handed Waldo a cup of coffee, and some buttered toast on a plate. ‘A Greek tragedy in Bexham. That would be more than the poor vicar could take.’

  ‘It would give him a good theme for a sermon. Something along the lines of do not do unto your brother, or sister, what you would do unto another.’

  ‘Why Waldo Astley!’ Meggie said, in her best mock-shocked Southern American.

  ‘He’d have a full house all right.’

  ‘Leaving that aside, are you really telling me you came all the way from America simply because of two old snaps. Is that really true?’ Meggie bit into her toast, relishing food for the first time for months.

  ‘I suppose in a way, yes, and in another way, no.’ Waldo leaned back in the old red velvet chair and of a sudden stared past Meggie. ‘I came to Bexham because of the snaps, as you call them – and also because of Hugh Tate whom I met, if you remember, in Paris in ’45. But it wasn’t just because of either of those things I came here. I think I came because something had happened here, to my father, and I felt that. According to my uncle it was not just my mother running off that closed his heart for ever. It was closed already, which was why she ran off. He suffered some huge disappointment, some heartbreak perhaps. I know it sounds a bit melodramatic, but the mystery of why my father had always been so full of rancour and hatred was beginning to worry me. I wanted to try to find out what it was – because it had to be something. Instead of which, it seems that instead of something I’ve found someone. And now I have, it kind of solves it all. If something happened to my father here, something that changed his life utterly – and not for the good – then what’s happened to me must surely balance the books.’

  Meggie smiled at him a smile as warm as spring sunshine, then leaned over and kissed him. ‘That’s just the nicest thing, Waldo. What a lovely thing to say.’

  ‘I say it because I can because it’s true, Meggie,’ Waldo replied. ‘Finding someone is more important than finding out some vague half-truth to do with someone else. Funny thing is – I don’t care any longer what that thing might have been. That’s history. My father’s history. I have to live mine now, and that’s what matters. And my history is here – with you.’

  ‘I think it’s time to pull a cracker,’ Meggie said gently. ‘I think we should let Christmas commence. Because I’d say we most surely have more to celebrate than we can possibly imagine.’

  Everyone gave parties over the next week. Even though they were still a long way from the land of plenty, the people of Bexham had saved what they could and bought what they could, and what they couldn’t buy they made, and what they couldn’t make they imagined.

  Christmas Day dawned cold, but with a fine frost high on the Downs that made the faded grasses sparkle and the hedgerows glint. As usual Bexham Church was fuller than it ever was during the rest of the year, but Stephen Anderson no longer minded this since he had come to appreciate that sometimes a congregation of two dozen people who were there to worship in earnest could be even more fulfilling for a priest than a church full of people whose minds were more on the roast turkey than the mysteries of the Trinity.

  After Matins Waldo and Meggie were invited to the Tates’ for drinks, where, with an air of caution in her voice, Judy, in what she thought was a low voice, whispered to Waldo that she might be pregnant.

  ‘I take it the Savoy dinner went OK, then?’ Waldo asked straightfaced, once Walter was well out of earshot.

  ‘You were absolutely right – it worked like a dream,’ Judy replied. ‘But if you really want to know, I’d say that my rumoured flirtation with a certain person – no names no pack drill – did even more than a lovely dinner at the Savoy for two. It acted like a fifty megawatt charge to our relationship.’

  ‘Tell that to my left eye.’ Waldo sighed.

  Judy laughed and looked across the room. ‘Now, only John and Mattie to go, really,’ she said. ‘Poor John’s on tenterhooks. His parents have indicated that they wish to ask Mattie to dinner, but they haven’t announced the date for it yet. John keeps wondering if they didn’t really mean it, if it will never really happen.’

  ‘It will happen. If it’s meant to happen, it does. It’s just difficult waiting for the moment, that’s all.’

  Loopy and Hugh tried once more to persuade Waldo and Meggie to stay for Christmas lunch but they refused, having made a private arrangement to dine at Cucklington House for what Meggie knew was to be her last Christmas there.

  Waldo and Meggie had prepared the lunch together and together they cooked it, Waldo surprising Meggie by how good he was in the kitchen and Meggie surprising Walter by how good she was, both having assumed that having been brought up in rich households neither of them would be really that good at preparing a full scale meal, even though it was only for two. They cooked side by side in perfect harmony, preparing a traditionally delicious Christmas dinner, albeit with a fresh farm chicken in place of the turkey they had not managed to secure in time.

  Yet although there were only the two of them sitting in the large dining room at Cucklington, a dark-panelled room which Meggie had decorated with an abundance of candles arrayed all around the room in old jam jars and beautiful traditional arrangements of dark green shiny red-berried holly intertwined with mistletoe and ivy, it seemed that there were six if not a dozen times as many people at the table, so hilarious was the conversation as the two of them ate their way through their mouthwatering dinner. Happily there were still good wines to be plundered from the cellars, although it took some looking, a task that Meggie conferred upon Waldo since she was spooked by the spirits she was convinced remained in some sort of limbo in the subterranean rooms of the large house.

  The fearless Waldo, innocent of any such ghostly accounts and stoutly maintaining that no good American should be put off by medieval spirits, returned with two bottles of ancient Vosné-Romanée, a Château Lafitte, and some extremely ancient crusted port. By the time it was the hour to listen to the King’s speech, the two of them were – as Meggie put it – well and truly toasted.

  After King George had finished addressing the nation, they exchanged presents, Meggie having at the eleventh hour decided to give Waldo a pair of antique gold cufflinks that had belonged to her grandfather as well as a leatherbound edition of Great Expectations which she had learned by chance from Judy was one of Waldo’s favourite books. Waldo presented her once again with his box beautifully wrapped in the shiniest of red papers. She opened it to find a door key.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, her blue eyes narrowing. ‘You have me here, sir. Is this one of your quaint jests, perhaps? Or something symbolic?’

  ‘Why, it is neither, madam,’ Waldo replied, entering into the spirit of things. ‘It is but a plain unvar
nished front door key.’

  ‘To the house in which I already live, sir. To a house indeed already sold, sir, moreover.’

  ‘Sold to someone who now has found someone to whom to give it.’

  ‘Oh, no. Not the mysterious inventor Mr O’Whatsit?’ Meggie said slowly, as she realised. ‘No, Waldo Astley – now you go too far.’

  ‘I do so hate to see houses go out of the family.’

  ‘But your bid was ridiculous!’

  ‘What I love most of all about you is your unfailing gratitude,’ Waldo scolded. ‘I had no idea of what anyone else would bid. And when I asked privately—’

  ‘They said to themselves rich Yank, let’s push him up.’

  ‘Well, of course. But I knew it was all in a very good cause.’

  ‘Ever since you arrived here because of two burned up photographs, all Bexham seems to have done is scrounge from you. It doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘What you really mean is, ever since I arrived here I keep throwing my money about, isn’t that it?’

  ‘Well, if you insist on being vulgar …’ Meggie shrugged her shoulders, but remembering all the backbiting and criticism with which Waldo’s generosity had been greeted she sighed. ‘Most people suspect good motives. It always follows that if you’re generous, you must be self-serving. It’s true, isn’t it? What they say – that no good deed goes unpunished.’

  ‘Oh sure, but don’t worry.’ Waldo laughed. ‘I’m used to people disliking my generosity, and believe me I do nothing I don’t want to. They say money doesn’t buy happiness, but I don’t go along with that. It might not buy you, the guy with all the money, happiness – but it certainly can buy happiness for other people. I got that out of this cracker.’ Meggie groaned and Waldo continued. ‘As you might have guessed, I’m pretty rich, Meggie. Actually pretty absurdly so – and through none of my own brilliance, I assure you. My father made several fortunes, and let me tell you no-one comes by all that money purely legitimately. I have this sense that a lot of his money came from places where it shouldn’t have – and if that was the case, I reckoned that if it came from bad use, why not put it to some good use.’