‘If we’d had a winter like this during the war, Jerry could have marched across the bloomin’ Channel, and no mistake,’ Gwen announced as she began to clear away her mistress’s breakfast things. ‘And look at you leaving those perfectly good crusts. You shouldn’t leave good bread like that, Mrs Tate. The way things are, you shouldn’t be leaving good bread. Not a crumb.’
‘OK – so you take it, Gwen. Why don’t you? See what you can get for it on the black market.’ Judy’s mother-in-law laughed, pushing her chair back from the table and getting up. ‘And while you’re at it, see if you can beg, steal or pay through the nose for some more fresh eggs, will you? I would die for some freshly scrambled eggs.’
‘At two and six a dozen? It’s enough to make anyone drop dead, Mrs Tate. Don’t know how they dare as to ask that sort of money, I really don’t. Not only that – who’s to say they’re fresh? I’d like to know where they find chickens laying in this dreadful weather. You ask me them’s foreign eggs they’re selling on the quay. You won’t find those to be British fresh farm.’
‘I don’t care if they come from Timbuktu, Gwen,’ replied Loretta Tate – Loopy to her friends – pulling her second cardigan around her tightly against the wind that was whistling through the gaps in the window frames. ‘I just have this simply awful desire for just one plate of soft scrambled eggs and bacon, or some thick French toast dripping with butter. Oh, for crying out loud, what did I have to go and say that for? Now I shall go completely out of my mind.’
‘You’d need to send to your folks in America if you want bacon, Mrs Tate,’ Gwen muttered, flicking the crumbs off the table and straight onto the floor with her mistress’s discarded napkin. ‘You’ve as much chance of getting your hands on rashers of bacon here as I have of marrying Errol Flynn.’
‘My, I quite forgot to tell you,’ Loopy called, pulling a face of mock innocence behind her maid’s back. ‘Mr Flynn called again last night, Gwen.’
To the sound of further grumbles and protestations Loopy ambled out of her dining room and into the small sitting room where she had already taken the precaution of lighting a wood fire. She was due to have lunch with her daughter-in-law, but since more heavy snow had been promised she thought perhaps it might be wiser to telephone to Judy, and cancel the engagement now.
‘The roads haven’t been cleared, darling,’ she told Judy on the telephone. ‘Not even half. I’m perfectly prepared to walk, but even that’s mighty hazardous – and if it snows as they say it’s going to …’ She stopped, disappointed suddenly at the idea of not going out to lunch, and perhaps Judy sensed this because she changed tack at once.
‘Tell you what, Loopy. If it doesn’t snow any more, and given that it’s too much to walk all the way over here, why don’t we meet at the Three Tuns? I know we won’t get much of a lunch, but at least we’ll be able to see each other.’
‘OK, darling. If it doesn’t snow any more, that’s a date. I can’t bear all this enforced isolation. It’s like living in Alaska.’
To pass the time, Loopy sat by the fire putting the fine detail to her latest painting. Unsurprisingly really, considering they were enduring the coldest winter weather on record, it was a snowscape, but she was rather pleased with the way she had managed to capture the over-bright light as well as the blues and yellows in the snowdrifts.
When she had finished she removed the canvas from her work easel and propped it on the top of her little desk, wondering if anyone would comment on it, or whether it would go unremarked the way most of her paintings did, ignored by her family as if they found them embarrassing, which, for all she knew, they quite probably did. That would appear to be the case since, except for Gwen of all people, everyone else in the household seemed to pretend that Loopy didn’t paint, that what she was doing was merely keeping herself busy, as if her increasingly good artwork was nothing more interesting than someone’s darning or yet another shapeless knitted garment, a hobby which they could happily ignore, which was in fact what indeed they did. Sometimes Loopy thought that if she filled the drawing room with every single canvas she had painted, her family would still come into the room at drinks time and fail to pass a single comment. The fact that Gwen noticed her work became a source of strength and inspiration for Loopy. If Gwen was prepared to comment, actually to talk about her painting, it meant that it existed, even though the maid’s remarks were invariably accompanied by what Loopy mentally called Gwenisms.
‘I don’t know nothing about art, not a single stitch,’ she once said seriously, as she stood regarding a self-portrait Loopy had just finished. ‘But what I do know is I know what I don’t like.’
‘Naturally,’ Loopy had replied, as if conversations like this were the norm. ‘So do you not like this?’
‘The colour’s nice. I like the way you paint colour. That red rug, for an instance. I can sort of feel its texture, and that’s clever. Then there’s the sea beyond, out of the window there. I love all that light you got on the sea. I really do like that.’
‘I’m glad you like that, because that’s my favourite bit – and it was a perfect swine to get right.’
‘I can imagine, Mrs T. I don’t know how you get light like that on water. That I really do like.’
‘So if you like it, that’s good, Gwennie.’
‘I can’t see as to why, Mrs T. I can’t see what jot of a difference whether I likes it or not will make.’
‘On the contrary, Gwen. If you like it, then that means there’s a strong possibility that someone else might, too. Although possibly no-one that we know.’
‘I like this one, Mrs T.,’ she said on this particular morning, the day Loopy finished the snowscape. ‘Really wintry that is. Makes you want to stoke up the fire. Course, it’ll be even nicer when the trees come out, won’t it?’
Happily this particular morning seemed determined to stay cloudless and sunny, although still bitterly cold, with the result that at midday Loopy wrapped herself up in her long fur coat and matching hat, and set off to make her way to the quay that ran by the side of the estuary, and the historic old inn that stood at the head of it.
As soon as she swung through the double doors into the main bar, Loopy could see Judy ahead of her, already there waiting, two gin and tonics at the ready, a most welcome sight. The saloon bar was surprisingly full, the number of people gathered helping to add warmth to a room heated by only the smallest of coke fires.
‘Cheers.’ Loopy raised her glass. ‘To the day when we can drink unwatered gin.’ She raised her eyes to heaven. ‘And may it please come real soon.’
‘I heard they’re selling this place,’ Judy said. ‘Walter heard it on the grapevine when he was down last weekend.’
‘I’m not surprised, honey. It must be the very devil to try to make money at times like these. Someone said to me it should be called the Three Millstones, not the Three Tuns.’
‘It’s always full, Loopy. Granted it is the only pub in Bexham, but they always seem to do good business.’
‘So why sell it if it’s so completely perfect?’
‘Walter said – although apparently it’s not meant to go any further – that poor Valerie isn’t too well.’
‘That is sad. I’m fond of Valerie, a lot fonder than I am of that over-cheerful husband of hers. Too busy playing Mine Host to general applause and leaving her to do all the work. So how’s my favourite daughter-in-law been, despite the weather, the weather – and the weather.’
Judy and Loopy chatted for the next ten minutes or so, both of them careful to keep the conversation commonplace, despite their genuine affection for each other. In fact it was their mutual respect which prevented Loopy from confiding in her daughter-in-law that she thought she could sense a vague feeling of discontent in her husband Hugh when he came home from London at the weekend, and Judy from discussing with her mother-in-law the fact that, despite every possible effort, she did not seem to be able to conceive. Instead they talked about the weather and the general shortage of most of life’s necessities, before being interrupted by a loud exchange aimed, it seemed to Loopy, in their particular direction. The conversation, if it could be called such, was between two red-faced local gentlemen seated at the bar, and it was about the fact that all the real troubles in the country were being caused by the demands of the womenfolk.
‘Who if you want my opinion have had it all to themselves for far too long during the war. It’s them what’s demanding to get everything their own way, that’s what’s the matter with this country – it’s the women.’
‘Excuse me?’ Loopy called suddenly, from her seat.
‘Loopy …’
But Loopy merely flapped one hand at Judy, looking, for her, purposefully determined, her mouth set in disapproval. ‘Excuse me, sir?’
One of the men at the bar looked round in mock astonishment.
‘You addressing me, madam?’
‘I am sir, certainly, because I am most interested in how you have become such an authority not only on this poor country’s problems, but on its women, if you please.’
The man in the tweed cap looked round at his colleague as if he was being addressed by a lunatic before turning back and staring at Loopy, while breathing deeply in and out.
‘Madam,’ he said, carefully doing up the top button of his tweed sports coat. ‘You may not find this palatable, you being a member yourself of the fair sex, but I have to tell you none the less that the general consensus of opinion is that a certain number of you ladies nowadays, now that the war is over, are finding it very difficult to remember that your place is in the home. That home is where you belong, where you should return and where you should stay.’
‘You’ve gathered this, I imagine, from pieces in the newspapers, from opinions expressed mainly by – let me guess – by members of the unfair sex. By men.’
‘That is quite beside the point, madam.’
‘I don’t see why. Men seem to write opinions for other men to talk about in their local hostelry, while all that is supplied for us ladies to read is recipes or how to make an evening dress out of an old sofa cover. Let me tell you something, sir. We women do not have a place any more than you men do. Why should we? If we didn’t have a place when the war was on, which we most certainly did not when you remember what a lot of us women did during the war, then why should we be expected to have a place now, may I ask? You men were only too happy to have us women working in your factories, driving your buses, nursing your injured – doing all the things in fact that up to that time only men had been allowed to do.’
‘Naturally. Because we were at war. But we’re at peace now.’
‘Of course. And because of that we women are expected to drop everything, put our pinnies and aprons back on again, and spend the rest of our lives tied to hearth and home and stove looking after you lot.’
‘That is what the sacred articles of marriarge are all about.’
‘And for those of us who aren’t marriard?’ Loopy wondered, echoing his mocking pronunciation. ‘What are they meant to do?’
‘Things might be different across the Atlantic, madam – and what isn’t, pray? But here single unmarried women stay at home and look after their parents. That is what single unmarried women do, what they are for. That is what is expected of them: to do their duty by their parents.’
‘Oh, come along, sir. Really. The same thing goes in some places across the other side of the Atlantic, you know. American men are just like you – they expect young women to sacrifice their lives and become unpaid drudges in family households, and believe you me it’s no more attractive over there than it is over here. So, no, no, we’re not so very different as you imagine,’ Loopy retorted. ‘On both sides of the water I’d say you guys are in for a bit of a shock one of these days. You just wait and see.’
Most of the men listening had laughed at her, but now more and more people joined in the public debate, and having got them all well and truly stirred up Loopy gave a slow smile and sat back to light the cigarette she had just pushed into her long, ebony holder.
‘Nothing like a well lobbed hand grenade to liven things up,’ she murmured to Judy, inhaling smoke. ‘I like that. The nerve of them. Keep women in their place indeed.’
‘You don’t think that’s right, Loopy?’ Judy said hesitantly. ‘You don’t think a woman’s place is in the home?’
‘Not necessarily. Should she choose it – well, that’s fine, and if it brings her fulfilment, absolutely right, but if she’d rather be out there climbing Mount Everest or flying around the world in a Tiger Moth – why in hell not? Are you quite happy to be tied to the stove by your apron strings, Judy? I doubt it – not after all you did in the war, surely?’
‘You surprise me, Loopy. But then you usually do. I know you value your free will and all that, but I always thought you stood rather strictly by what our friend at the bar referred to as the articles of marriarge.’
‘You bet I do – at least by the sanctity of marriage. That’s how I see it and I won’t hear a word against it. But I wouldn’t sacrifice my life for it – for love maybe, but not for marriarge.’
Feeling vaguely embarrassed by the conversation because it happened to concern the doubts in her own mind, Judy diverted her mother-in-law away from further argument by ordering lunch from George, their over-convivial host who, with an exaggerated wink of his rheumy eye, promised them a good slice of chicken each in their Spam sandwiches, provided, of course, that they didn’t tell everyone.
Over another watered down gin and tonic Judy and Loopy seemed to forget all about their earlier discussion and gossiped instead about what had, or was rumoured to have, happened in Bexham since they last met. Then the skies suddenly clouded over and the threat of yet another blizzard sent them hurrying off home in opposite directions.
As Judy passed the end of the lane that led up to the church she saw a pair of car headlights coming slowly towards her in the snow which was now falling thick and fast. A moment later the car began to slide across the road as in spite of the chains on the tyres the driver lost control on the compacted and frozen surface. Suddenly aware of the danger she was in, Judy jumped sideways into the lane, falling into a deep drift as she did so, then rolling over just in time to avoid being crushed by the car that had come to a standstill only a couple of feet from where she lay.
‘My God!’ she heard through the snow as the driver wrenched his door open and tumbled out into the snowdrift. ‘My God – are you OK wherever you are?’
It was, oddly enough, another American voice, and it was accented so much like Loopy’s Southern tones that Judy thought hazily that the owner might even prove to be some sort of relative of her mother-in-law.
‘Yes, I’m fine!’ she called back. ‘I’m over here – in front of the car!’
The driver was by her side in a moment, half stumbling and half falling through the snow.
‘Dear God, I thought I might have killed you,’ he said, falling to his knees where Judy was now slowly sitting up. ‘I am so – so sorry.’
Judy looked up and, finding herself staring into a pair of intense dark eyes, she started to laugh.
‘Don’t be silly, I’m fine, really, I’m fine. It was just an accident, no more and no less,’ she assured him.
‘No, I really am so very, very sorry.’
Taking the arm held out to her, Judy looked round for Hamish and bent to retrieve his lead.
‘Don’t be silly, worse things happen at sea, and all the time.’ She started brushing the snow off her coat. ‘I’m Judy Tate, by the way, and you are?’
‘A great deal better now that I see you’re unhurt. I’m Waldo Astley.’
Waldo took Judy’s gloved hand and shook it. It was only as she found herself staring into a pair of large, dark eyes that Judy started to realise that the drama that had just taken place was as nothing compared to the one that might be just about to happen if she continued to hold the hand that was shaking hers.
‘What a wonderfully absurd name,’ Meggie exclaimed, lighting a cigarette expertly with one hand, at the same time cradling the telephone receiver between her face and her shoulder. ‘Does he look as absurd as his name?’
‘No.’ Judy cleared her throat. ‘No, absurd is not the word I personally would use about Mr Waldo Astley. He dresses beautifully, by the way. Cashmere camel coat, hat at just the right angle – pure Long Island, I would imagine.’
‘What else did you discover? Anything interesting?’
‘You don’t think the fact that he nearly killed me is remotely interesting?’
‘Of course he didn’t nearly kill you, Judy. He merely gave you a bit of a nudge with his car.’
‘It was an American car. A rather large Buick motor car.’
‘All American cars are large, Judy darling.’ Meggie sighed and blew a smoke ring into the air, watching it without much interest. ‘So, tall dark stranger nearly knocks local woman over but doesn’t – talk about no news is no news, Mrs Tate. I want a bit more colour than that.’
Judy thought for a moment. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I thought he was a bit odd. Gave me goose bumps.’
‘There are goose bumps and there are goose bumps, Mrs Tate. And before you tell which sort he gave you, remember you are a married woman.’
Lionel Eastcott was the next to meet Waldo Astley, and he furthered his acquaintance with him at a location where only a few months before he would certainly not have wished to find himself, that is in the house of a woman with whom he had once imagined himself passionately in love.
Gloria Morrison, née Bishop, lived in a pretty faux-Jacobean house that stood in an acre of garden on the corner of the road that turned to the left in front of her grounds to lead around the top end of the now completely frozen estuary. Built in Edwardian times, the house had thick walls of what had once been dark red brick, and small latticed windows that did not take best advantage of the lovely view beyond the low wall surrounding the property. Nevertheless, compared to more modern houses it was definitely handsome, and when spring finally arrived and turned to summer visitors would be reminded of the beautiful garden the previous owner had laid out, the house covered with a fine wisteria on its south side and the grounds laid to lawns and borders of sweet-scented shrubs. All in all it could be said to be an enviable property, and it would have attracted much more interest when it had come on the market had times been different, but the last owner had died suddenly in the autumn, and his executors had been forced to sell in a winter that had turned into one of the worst in living memory.
Their misfortune was Gloria Bishop’s good luck, for when on a flying visit to West Sussex she passed through Bexham for old times’ sake and saw the For Sale sign outside a house she had always coveted she immediately decided to buy. To her great delight her offer of three hundred and fifty pounds below an already much reduced price was snapped up at once, and six weeks later she found herself comfortably installed at the Starlings.
Of course, given the position of her newly purchased house, Gloria had soon spotted her old flame Lionel Eastcott playing with what she realised must be his grandson on the village green. Watching him from the privacy of her motor car, Gloria noted that Lionel, unsurprisingly, had aged considerably. Not that this did anything to prevent her from planning to surprise him with an invitation.
Remembering as she did that Lionel had once been a fanatical bridge player Gloria started to make plans for a bridge weekend.
A few days before Judy’s stirring encounter with the beautifully dressed American, Lionel Eastcott stared into the dining room. His daughter, Mathilda, had laid out what seemed to both of them to be a sumptuous tea for grandson Max and two small friends who lived across from them on the other side of the village green. Somehow, in all honesty Lionel did not like to think how Mathilda had begged, borrowed or stolen the ingredients for the birthday tea, determined that her little boy should be able to celebrate his big day in style with a few of his friends.
‘Mr Eastcott – the telephone! It’s a Mrs Morrison, I think she said her name was. Yes, it was a Mrs Morrison all right, I would say. Yes.’
Lionel had noticed that Ellen always looked quite worried when the telephone in the new hall rang, principally, he supposed, because it hardly ever did ring, so unsociable had he become. Besides, few people in the village actually possessed a telephone, so it was still very much a novelty in Bexham, with women like Ellen always imagining that, like the arrival of a wartime telegram, its ringing must herald bad news. Novelty or not, Lionel found himself hesitating before he went to pick up the receiver, feeling both shy and awkward. He hadn’t spoken to Gloria since her daughter had been killed the night his grandson Max was born as the bombs were dropping all around the estuary, and many of the outlying timber-framed farmhouses went up in smoke long before anyone could get to them. It had been in one of those that Gloria’s only daughter Virginia had died, a terrible coincidence, his old flame Gloria losing her only daughter just as little Max had put in his first appearance in this world. Virginia had gone to the farm to fetch a midwife for Lionel’s daughter, and perhaps it was the awful embarrassment he still felt about this that made him hesitate, as if in some way it was his fault that Virginia had volunteered to go for the midwife, which of course it hadn’t been.
He was about to instruct Ellen to tell Mrs Morrison that he was out when he thought better of it, realising that it was going to be a bit difficult to be permanently out to a woman who had moved in so close to his new house. Besides, he had written to her about Virginia, and she had written back. They had communicated, and now that Gloria had moved back to the area it would prove more than a little difficult to avoid her in the village, Bexham being such a small community.
‘Very well, I’ll take the call,’ Lionel told Ellen, realising that his daily maid was staring at him in a really rather over-interested way as he went into the hall to pick up the black Bakelite telephone.
‘Come for a bridge evening on Friday night, Lionel, oh do!’ said the voice on the other end. ‘Gossipy – nothing serious.’
She was still Gloria, still deep-voiced, and doubtless still smoking too much too. If he could not remember precisely how much she had despised him when they were young, Lionel might even have been tempted to tell himself that she was still his Gloria. But the war years had brought him up with a start, and although he had remained head over heels in love with Gloria long after she had married her first husband, Lionel could not deceive himself as to Gloria’s true feelings for him, either then or now.
The truth was that Gloria had broken Lionel’s heart, and, strictly on the rebound, he had married Mathilda’s mother Maude, to whom, effectively, he now realised in his great, grand maturity, Gloria had handed him over, lock, stock and barrel.
So it was that having set his eyes on what he thought was a beautiful rose, Lionel had, emotionally speaking, been thrown a daisy. Probably because of this, he had never managed to make Maude at all happy, not even when they were young. He realised now that poor Maude had only really found true happiness and fulfilment in the war, finally to die a heroine. Unfortunately the manner of her tragic death, even some years on, still acted as a dreadful reproach to her husband.
Why had he never even suspected poor Maude of possessing the qualities that she had displayed so conspicuously once she joined the WVS? Why had he never recognised her courage? Most of all why had he constantly mocked her the way he had? As the years passed, it was his stupid and eternal facetiousness more than anything that came back to haunt him.
Even so, for some reason, possibly loneliness, the idea of spending at least a little bit of time with people of his own age, who did not make him feel not just old but quite past it, suddenly seemed more than attractive. He heard himself telling Gloria that he would come over for an evening of chatty bridge, for old times’ sake, but that he couldn’t be late.
‘It’s because of Max, my grandson. I like to get up and have breakfast with him at an early hour.’
Gloria gave what sounded to Lionel like an over-familiar laugh. It was a laugh that floated down the years, the before-the-war years. The laugh that had rung out around the tennis courts, and in the fields where all the young in Bexham had loved to walk, gathering primroses, listening to the skylarks overhead, watching for hares boxing in the bright sunlight, and pursuing other occupations which now seemed heartbreaking in their innocence.
‘Still the golden charmer, eh, Lionel? Half past six drinks, dinner seven thirty, bridge eight thirty. Don’t be late, now, there’s a good fellow.’
Gloria’s ability to dominate him, her dangerous brand of charm, and her devil-may-care attitude came back to Lionel in a rush. He found himself staring at the telephone receiver, which he had just replaced. He should have refused. He should have said he was otherwise occupied. If he had been thinking on his feet he would have realised that he really did not want anything more to do with Gloria. Gloria was a doodlebug of a woman. You never knew when her engines would suddenly cut out, not until that sudden silence, and once they had, you never knew where she was going to hit you.
Indeed, Gloria quiet was still a dreadfully frightening thought. As he turned to go back to the new sitting room with its pale green walls and old chintz curtains, Lionel made up his mind that on Saturday night he would arrive at Gloria’s house on time, and leave early. It was the only solution. He must not get embroiled with her again. It would be quite fatal.
‘That’s nice for you then, Mr Eastcott.’ Ellen peered round the corner at him.
‘What is, Ellen?’
‘You going to bridge with Mrs Morrison. I hear she’s been a bit of a lonely old thing since she came back to live in the village.’
Lionel carried on into the sitting room. As if it was not enough that Ellen listened in to all his telephone calls, now she was giving out a verdict on his social life. And to hear her calling the once divine Gloria a lonely old thing was a bit of a shock, to say the least.
‘I expect you have finished the house now, Ellen, So why don’t you take the rest of the day off?’
Ellen shook her head. ‘Gracious no, Mr Eastcott. I’ve hardly started. Besides, there’s no-one at home for me now, not since my Harry was killed. So what is there for me to go home for, Mr Eastcott? That’s what I keep asking myself, what is there to go home for?’
Lionel sank back into his favourite old leather armchair. It seemed that Gloria Morrison was not the only lonely old thing living in post-war Bexham.
Despite having made new friends in London, Waldo Astley, armed with only his precious guides, had made it a point to motor down to Bexham in his Buick quite alone. It was an arduous journey made worse by the ghastliness of the small hotels at which he was forced by the weather to stop all too frequently. It seemed to him that it was for this reason that, when he had eventually reached his destination, either from fatigue or misjudgement he had come so near to knocking down Judy Tate at the entrance to Church Lane.
He was still mentally running through the horror of the incident and longing for a large drink when he signed into the Three Tuns, and gratefully surrendered his luggage to an aged retainer. Useless to tell himself to stop thinking what would have happened had he run the girl and her little dog over. It was not until after his second drink that he finally managed to put that thought out of his mind, and, finding his eyes wandering to the other occupants of the bar, realised he was being watched intently by a white-haired and white-moustached tweed-suited gentleman. He smiled at him, because after a couple of drinks Waldo usually felt it was perfectly all right to smile at strangers, particularly strangers who were staring at a fellow. Besides, this particular stranger seemed to possess one of those faces that encouraged friendliness.
‘You’re a stranger in Bexham, sir?’
‘If you don’t mind me saying so, that sounds like a line from a Western.’
Lionel Eastcott smiled. ‘Yes, quite so. And I must say, I do agree. I actually only ask because in this weather it is unusual to say the least to see an unfamiliar face in here. In fact I doubt if we’ve seen a stranger in our midst for weeks, so of course we take note. We have to. We’re that short of excitements.’
An exchange of introductions followed, as also another round of refreshment, and it wasn’t long before Lionel and Waldo were well enough acquainted to be exchanging the sort of intimacies induced by taking drink in convivial establishments. Thus it was no surprise that within half an hour of their introduction Lionel discovered that Waldo Astley was as keen a bridge player as he was himself.
‘Can’t say I’m surprised, Mr Astley. You look every inch the bridge player. Intelligent face, high domed forehead, conservative cut to your clothes – the sort of opponent one would think twice about playing against. Which is why I hope maybe that if we play sometime we’ll be partners rather than opponents. Except – as it happens …’
‘Go on – surprise me,’ Waldo said with a grin. ‘There’s a game coming up.’
‘As it happens I’m desperate for someone to make up a four tonight in the house of an old friend who has moved into the village. Colonel Wetherby – a regular – sadly he’s down with flu – gone to his chest, poor fellow, running a high temperature and confined to barracks – otherwise he’d be there. Nothing else would keep him from the bridge table, other than his own demise – hence the panic. I’m particularly anxious to make up the numbers as I have no wish to disappoint the lady in question, having once, in my youth, had pretensions to her hand.’
‘This sounds so interesting it would take someone a lot less curious than myself to refuse.’
‘Good.’ Lionel beamed at Waldo before leaning forward and confiding, ‘Besides which, the food here is terrible. You’ll do a lot better for grub chez Mrs Morrison.’
Some few minutes later, Waldo having washed and brushed up, the two set off in good spirits, making towards Gloria Morrison’s house with the kind of optimism that always precedes a game of cards, a bottle of wine or two, and a good and very welcome dinner.
As soon as Gloria saw Lionel’s new companion standing in her hall, the light illuminating his head of thick dark hair and his handsome face, she knew that the evening was going to be considerably more interesting than if Colonel Wetherby had been taking up his usual position at her bridge table. As she always did, in spite of food rationing, Gloria had managed to lay on an excellent supper, courtesy of a one-eyed gentleman who had called at her door not only with pâtés and wines from France but with some well hung steaks and fresh vegetables too, all of which more than made up for the previous week’s diet of whale meat in onion sauce and the sort of offal that she had truly never imagined finding herself eating, ever.
So what with the table neatly laid with fresh cards, and the excitement that a handsome stranger’s entering a house necessarily brings, Gloria was so pleased with Lionel’s find that she could almost have become engaged to the poor man on the spot – almost, but, happily for Lionel, not quite.
Lionel quite thought he had the cut of the American’s jib during the first couple of rubbers, having noted the young man’s style of bidding and card play which appealed as being, to say the least, reckless. He seemed to revel in gambling on card placements without ever thinking the hand through, and playing finesse after finesse even when it was unnecessary. Naturally he was only too happy when Gloria, who had elected to make Waldo her playing partner for the evening, suggested upping the stakes from a penny to sixpence a hundred. Lionel was no gambler, most especially not at the card table, yet judging from the level of play he had been witnessing he could only be encouraged into thinking that he was as near to a sure thing as was perfectly possible. This indeed was what the next rubber effectively proved. Waldo and Gloria played ever more recklessly only to lose ingloriously, and go down a further two thousand points.
‘Look here,’ Waldo laughed as Gloria passed him the score pad. ‘Look here, this really will not do at all. We are down fifteen shillings here, Mrs Morrison, and I for one simply cannot afford such losses! So what do we all say to making it a shilling a hundred? Give us poor dopes a chance to repair a little of this terrible damage to our finances?’
After consulting with Mrs Highsmith, his partner, who in his experience was one of the better women bridge players in the village, Lionel gave their joint consent and dealt the first hand of the new rubber. From that moment everything went downhill, as without even changing their style of play Waldo and Gloria went swiftly from fifteen shillings in arrears to a profit of four pounds two shillings and sixpence.
‘Well, you know what they do say?’ Waldo gave an easy, slow smile, as his opponents paid up. ‘Lucky at cards, et cetera.’
‘I do hope not,’ Gloria cut in with what she hoped was a sufficiently coquettish look. ‘I for one have had quite enough of being unlucky in love.’
‘We did have a run of exceedingly good fortune, Mrs Morrison,’ Waldo reminded his playing partner. ‘All our finesses suddenly got lucky, and as for your remarkably perceptive double on that last bid of Five Diamonds …’
‘Absolute nonsense. The call of a very fine player, if I may say.’
So the evening drew to a close, Lionel and Mrs Highsmith doing their best to take their leave in as light-hearted a manner as possible while Waldo continued his elegant flirtation with their by now enthralled hostess.
‘I say, where on earth did you find your innocent seeming card shark, Mr Eastcott? He must have come off an ocean liner, surely?’ Mrs Highsmith wondered, as Lionel took her by the arm to help her down the frozen path to the gate.
‘I found him, as you put it, Mrs Highsmith, in the Three Tuns, earlier in the evening. We were quite desperate, as you may imagine. The colonel had only just gone down with a high temperature at teatime. Not like him to miss an opportunity for friendly bridge, not to mention a good dinner.’
‘Yes, but do you think Mr Astley played entirely straight, Mr Eastcott?’
‘I certainly didn’t see any cards falling out of his sleeve. Unless of course he did it all by mirrors.’
‘I’m being perfectly serious, Mr Eastcott. I simply can’t afford to lose that sort of money playing bridge. I am a widow, you know.’
‘Then I’m very much afraid you shouldn’t play with the grown-ups, Mrs Highsmith,’ Lionel retorted, suddenly fed up with her carping. ‘No, you shouldn’t play with the grown-ups if you don’t want to lose, unless of course what you really mean is that you don’t like losing money.’
Mrs Highsmith laughed, and at the same time squeezed Lionel’s arm. ‘That’s exactly what I mean, you dear man. I do hope it wasn’t my bad play.’
‘I think not, Mrs Highsmith. I think what happened was – as our American friends are fond of saying – like it or not, we were well and truly hustled.’
With the temperature having fallen to well below freezing early in the evening no trains ran that night out of London because of heavily frozen points. None the less, Hugh and Walter Tate, who were both equally determined not to be denied the company of their wives that weekend, agreed to take a chance on the road conditions and drive down in Walter’s MG TC. Wrapped up to resemble nothing more nor less than Arctic explorers, and with extra Thermos flasks of hot coffee laced with brandy on board, they set off more full of hope than expectation, but only managed to make it halfway to Bexham. In fact a journey that normally took them little more than an hour and a half ended up by taking them nearly six.
Half frozen into imbecility they stopped off at Horsham and spent the rest of the night thawing out in the bedroom of a pub whose own temperature wasn’t that much above freezing point. The next morning they woke to bright sunshine and the start of a good thaw, conditions which while not making for carefree motoring did at least enable the benighted travellers to get to Bexham in time for lunch.
Arriving home at last Hugh found Loopy still well wrapped up in her furs painting in the room upstairs that she had temporarily turned into her studio, the conservatory having proved far too cold in this coldest of cold winters.
‘I couldn’t resist it,’ she said, after welcoming him home. ‘It’s even freezing up here despite being so near the airing cupboard and all that heat that rises from the kitchen, but do look at this light. I mean look at that light over the sea, Hugh, doesn’t it take your breath away!’
Hugh did indeed give it a cursory look, which was more than he afforded the canvas upon which his beloved wife was working, his mind directing itself with considerably more enthusiasm towards pouring himself an extra large gin and tonic.
‘How was London?’ Loopy called after him, as he headed back downstairs.
‘Very cold!’ Hugh called back. ‘Now don’t stay up there all day! I am absolutely starving!’
But by the time Loopy came back to reality, tearing herself away from her intense painting session, she found Gwen had already served Hugh his lunch, quite alone, and having finished he had disappeared, in all probability to go for a walk.
Hurrying to the dining room window, she saw her husband making his way as quickly as he could through the banks of snow that had blown up into frozen billows along the edge of the estuary. Grabbing her fur hat and gloves from the hall stand Loopy hurried after him as fast as she could, but she stumbled through the deep snow and fell hopelessly behind, and before long Hugh was gone from her sight.
Following what she hoped were his footprints, which were fast disappearing under a fresh fall of snow, she finally reached the rise that led up to the headland. Looking up into the snowstorm she could just make out two figures, seemingly in conversation, and one of them she recognised quite definitely as being her husband.
‘Hugh?’ she called. ‘Hugh honey, wait, will you?’
The snow thickened, swirling round her in the wind that was now getting up fast as the tide began its turn. For a moment she lost the figures entirely; then the knoll came into view again as the snow drifted in the other direction.
But now there was only one man standing there, all alone. Hugh.
‘But I swear I saw two people,’ Loopy insisted as they made their way back home through the snow.
‘Me and my shadow, darling.’
‘Maybe I’m getting double vision in my old age.’
‘I could do with a double gin at mine.’
‘Hugh – it isn’t even teatime!’
‘Doesn’t stop a chap thinking ahead. In this weather all one can think of is the inner man. Makes petty bleak thinking, too, as a general rule.’
‘You sure you weren’t talking to someone, Hugh?’
‘Only the Spirit of Times Past.’
‘I definitely saw someone.’
‘Then you were definitely seeing things.’
Hugh smiled round at her as if to reassure her. But Loopy knew that particular smile of old. It was the smile Hugh always employed when he was determined to get away with something.