No-one was looking at the paintings, no-one at all. It had been bad enough at first when it had seemed that no-one was going to show up at all, and after over half an hour of surveying a room empty of all but Waldo, the two gallery assistants and herself Loopy was all for calling it a day and a very bad one at that. Then suddenly as if on cue the place filled up with a crowd of chattering people, many of whom seemed to know each other, and those that didn’t being soon introduced. As they helped themselves liberally to the drink on offer a cocktail party quickly developed, and within another quarter of an hour it was barely possible to see any of the hung paintings due to a fog of cigarette smoke from the gathered assembly.
‘Going very well, I would say,’ one of the gallery assistants remarked en passant. She was a pretty blonde woman of great style, typical of the kind hired by galleries for very little money, only too glad to leave their equally chic homes, and possibly their boring husbands, to go out to work for free in smart places in which they might get snapped for The Tatler.
Since by now even fewer people were paying any attention to the paintings Loopy was utterly amazed by the young woman’s remark, so much so that she grabbed Waldo’s arm as he ambled by, and dragged him to one side.
‘No-one has looked at the paintings at all!’ she hissed out of the side of her mouth. ‘No-one – but no-one!’
‘I keep telling you, Loopy – this is the way it is at openings.’
‘People go to the opening of an exhibition and don’t look at the work? You’re kidding me!’
‘We all do it.’
‘Never! Never once in my life!’
‘Never once? Not even when you were young?’
‘Well yes – I suppose I might have done when I was young, yes – but that’s different.’
‘A lot of these people are young, Loopy.’
‘So, there are some bright young things here. But there are also some not so young and not so bright older things – and they’re all carrying on as if it’s a cocktail party!’
‘The way of the world – or rather the way of the art world. Now come on, try to relax. I know this is probably one of the worst moments of your life – but try to enjoy it.’
‘One of the worst? It is the worst! I never for one moment imagined I would feel so – so exposed! Having a lot of total strangers arrive up here, to not stare at your work!’
‘If you’re that nervous, you should be happy that’s what they’re doing. You should be rejoicing that they all have their backs to your paintings. If you’re feeling that exposed, they’re doing the right thing, surely?’
‘You’re incorrigible, Waldo.’ Loopy laughed, at last. ‘You really are. I feel as if I have nothing on, actually.’
‘OK, a fellow can dream.’ Waldo gave a little cough, and then smiled. ‘Now I am going to leave you in the very capable hands of Adam Forster here, who is already a fan and has been dying to talk to you all evening, while I go off and try to find out what the word on the street is.’
Before she could protest, Loopy found herself engaged in conversation with a tall, lanky, bespectacled young man with a shock of frizzy hair, half of which seemed to fall across his eyes so that he spent most of the time tossing his head back. In her highly nervous state the motion started to mesmerise Loopy even as she pretended to listen to his opinions on everything from politics to Art.
‘Good news!’ Waldo exclaimed happily on his return some half an hour later. ‘You seen how many red dots there are?’
Loopy looked around, and then eased her way through the throng to the nearest wall to discover that four out of the eight paintings hanging on it had small red dots fixed to them to show they were sold. Hardly able to contain her delight, she proceeded to do a tour of the gallery as best she could, coming to the happy conclusion that over fifty per cent of the paintings on show had already been accounted for. Hardly able to believe her good fortune she threaded her way back through the buzzing guests to find Waldo.
‘I have another surprise for you, Mrs Tate – turn round slowly, and try not to drop down dead from shock.’
Loopy did as asked, to find Hugh standing in front of her dressed in his best and bearing a bunch of flowers cut from their garden.
‘Hugh! Oh, Hugh – what a lovely surprise!’
Loopy flung her arms round her husband. Taken quite aback, he was forced to hold his bouquet to one side, and laughed as Loopy hugged him, almost desperately.
‘Oh, Hugh! Hugh darling!’ Tears were welling in Loopy’s eyes. ‘I can’t tell you what this means! I really can’t!’
‘Really?’ Hugh smiled. ‘I say.’ He cleared his throat
‘This is wonderful, Hugh! I can’t tell you!’ She stood back. ‘And guess what? I even seem to have sold some paintings. There must be a lot of people here with more money than taste.’
Hugh chuckled. ‘That’s terrific, Loopy,’ he said. ‘How many do you think you might have sold?’
‘Might have? Have have! I’ve sold nearly half!’
‘I say. Nearly half? I say!’
Hugh laughed aloud, obviously delighted, beaming at Loopy as she took him by the hand to lead him past some of her red-dotted paintings.
‘Well, I do say,’ Hugh said, smiling with pleasure. ‘You must be quite good after all.’
‘Well, I suppose I can’t be all bad,’ Loopy concluded dreamily, staring yet again at a picture with a red dot on it.
‘Sorry – excuse me – but are you the artist?’ a young man asked, having overheard. ‘You’re more than not bad, if I may say so – in fact you are extremely talented. And even prettier than some of your pictures.’
‘But much more expensive,’ Hugh said with a proprietary smile, pulling Loopy slightly to him. ‘You couldn’t possibly afford her.’
‘Thank you,’ Loopy said to the young man. ‘You’re most kind.’
The young man smiled as Hugh steered Loopy away to a corner of the gallery where there was a little more space.
‘First of all, my apologies,’ Hugh said. ‘For being quite such an oaf. And a spoilt one at that.’
‘I forgive you,’ Loopy said, refusing to dissemble. ‘Even though you were really quite awful.’
Hugh smiled, somewhat chastened, and to alleviate his discomfort Loopy leaned forward and kissed him briefly on the lips.
‘Don’t worry, I never stopped loving you, Hugh. That would be impossible.’
‘You had every right to do so,’ Hugh countered. ‘Don’t know what came over me.’
‘Something mysterious.’
‘Jealousy.’ He sighed.
‘Understandable. I used to be terribly jealous of the Navy,’ Loopy admitted with a smile.
‘Really? Even so, you didn’t take to your bed when I went to sea and pretend to be dying.’
‘I felt like it.’
They looked at each other, their love and faith still as firmly in place as it had ever been.
‘I have another apology,’ Hugh said as quietly as he could over the noise of the party. ‘I was very dismissive of your paintings and I had no right to be.’
‘No – no you didn’t,’ Loopy agreed, slightly surprising Hugh once more as he had hoped for a little mollification. ‘That I do agree with wholeheartedly. You really shouldn’t have been quite so dismissive because it’s not as if you’re a philistine. You know a lot about painting – in fact you do have quite an eye. And that’s what hurt. If you’d just been a bonehead then I would have understood. At least I would have understood a little better. But you’re not, so yes, you should have known better.’
‘Jealousy again, I suppose,’ Hugh sighed. ‘I was jealous in case you would start spending more time in your studio than you did with me.’
‘No chance.’ Loopy smiled. ‘But I’ve been jealous as well – and about something far more serious. I’ve been suffering paroxysms of jealousy about you and your young girlfriend.’
‘You mean Meggie, I suppose,’ Hugh replied quietly. ‘And if you do, I assure you that you have absolutely no cause for any anxiety on that score.’
‘I saw you in the car that afternoon. That afternoon by the old boatyard. I heard most of what you were saying as well.’
‘I thought that was you in the shadows.’
‘You saw me?’
‘I thought it might be you. Only thought. I only got a glimpse. Look – can we talk about this over dinner?’
‘No. We don’t want to spoil our appetites.’
‘It won’t,’ Hugh assured her with a smile. ‘I was just trying to persuade her to come back to work for me.’
‘I know that now.’
‘Did you ever doubt it?’
‘No,’ Loopy said quickly. ‘No, not for a moment.’
She looked at him. She was lying, of course, because she had doubted him entirely, but that was her fault, not his, and so there was no point in berating someone who was in fact quite innocent. If she was angry with anyone that person would have to be herself, since her pain was all due to her own imaginings. She could have asked Hugh at any time about Meggie but she had chosen not to, just as she could have told him at any time about her exhibition but had not. And the reason she had not wanted any sort of direct confrontation with her husband was not her husband’s fault. It was her own fault entirely, and the reason for her intransigence was the doubt she was nursing not about Hugh but about herself – about her talent for painting and her ongoing worth as a wife and a mother. What she had been feeling was what so many women of her age felt as they saw their children growing up and getting married and having babies, and their husbands apparently losing a certain amount of interest in them. Suddenly she had felt unwanted and unloved and rather than face up to her own misgivings and examine their validity she had taken the easier path, that of suspecting her husband of having an affair when in fact he was perfectly blameless, and of making him take the responsibility for the serious self-doubts she had concerning her art by trying to turn his indifference to her work into a reason for not seeing her exhibition through.
She looked round once more to see how many of her paintings carried the all important red dot and saw to her enormous delight that one of the gallery assistants was marking two more paintings as sold.
Imagine, she thought to herself. Imagine if I had been weak-minded enough to give in. Just imagine – this wonderful day would never have happened. It just doesn’t bear thinking about.
Hugh took one of her hands and turned her round to him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I perhaps should have waited till dinner. This wasn’t really the time or the place.’
‘On the contrary, Hugh,’ Loopy replied, touching his cheek with one hand. ‘This is absolutely the time and absolutely the place.’
Waldo accepted an invitation to join Hugh and Loopy for a celebratory dinner at the Savoy. He had tried to insist that they should go on their own, but since the show had been a runaway success the numbers at dinner were growing fast and both Hugh and Loopy pressed Waldo so ardently that naturally he agreed, safe in the knowledge that he would not be – as he put it – an all too obvious loner. Promising to join the party as quickly as he could, Waldo waited until they had left before making his way to the back of the gallery and a brass-studded leather-covered door marked Private.
‘Hello?’ he said, after knocking once. ‘You there, Dick? It’s Waldo.’
The announcement of his arrival gave the young woman who was standing talking to the owner of the gallery just enough time to slip quietly into the adjoining office, which she did with a finger held tightly to her lips.
‘Might I come in?’ Waldo asked from outside, pushing the door open. ‘I know what you get up to in here. So I’m always careful.’
‘I’m all alone,’ the large, balding man behind the desk told him. ‘And wishing I wasn’t.’
‘You gallery owners are worse than film producers,’ Waldo told him. ‘And that’s saying something.’
‘A great success, it would seem.’ Richard Oliver got up and went to a cupboard to fetch a bottle of brandy. ‘Shall we drink to it?’
‘Why not? I haven’t touched a drop all evening,’ Waldo returned. ‘Too busy propping up the genius.’
Richard Oliver poured them both a good shot of expensive French cognac and sat back down, indicating a chair opposite his desk to Waldo.
‘I’m still a little too nervous to sit, if you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t understand why you should be nervous,’ Richard Oliver said. ‘What was there to be nervous about?’
‘How Loopy would take it, I guess. Good God, Dick – there was everything to be nervous about! Suppose nobody had showed?’
Richard Oliver shook his head. ‘No chance. Not in this Gallery. When people get an invite to an opening here, they come.’
‘You get my drift.’
‘So how many paintings “Sold”, eh?’
Waldo looked hard at his friend and suddenly smiled. ‘Guess,’ he said.
‘Don’t tell me you bought the lot. That really would be a little excessive – not to say suspicious.’
‘Over sixty per cent have been sold, Dick.’
Richard Oliver whistled and raised his eyebrows. ‘Going to cost you, Waldo. You know how expensive I am.’
‘I only bought four.’
It was the gallery owner’s turn to stare. ‘You’re joking.’
‘I most certainly am not joking.’
‘You only bought four? So who the heck bought all the others?’
Waldo shrugged. ‘I did my bit. I told that pretty assistant of yours—’
‘Gabriella?’
‘I told her which pictures to dot and when, which she did – and the next thing we knew, when we were about to dot some more, your other assistant—’
‘Elizabeth. Lizzie Mells.’
‘She was sticking up red dots all over the place. I was about to say hang on – thinking she was being just a little previous – when Gabriella and I realised they were all genuine sales. We saw the buyers’ happy faces – Lizzie went and checked them. I don’t think I need even have bothered to sticker my four. I think they’d have sold anyway.’
Richard now stared at Waldo in a keen, pensive way. ‘I had better get her to agree to some sort of contract – verbal or otherwise.’
‘Really? I thought you said she was – what was it? A moderately talented little amateur.’
‘Yes, all right.’ Richard smiled. ‘I am never going to live it down, am I?’
‘I won’t say a word. I promise.’
‘In return for?’
Waldo smiled. ‘In return for excusing me the gallery charge.’
‘On no – no, come on, Waldo!’ Richard protested. ‘A chap has to make a living! And the deal was you rent the gallery—’
‘I know what the deal was, Richard. But things are a little different now. I was going to pay the rent for the gallery – sure – because you thought you were only going to make commission on four or five cheapish little paintings – bought by me. But now look. Look what’s happened now. You’ve sold over half of what you have on the walls to bona fide buyers – to people who know a thing or three – and judging from what young Adam Forster was saying to me earlier there is going to be quite a piece about Mrs Tate somewhere in tomorrow’s evening paper – so you have found yourself a new artist, but really.’
‘You have found me a hot new artist, Waldo.’ Richard smiled and then nodded. ‘OK. Deal. I’ll let you off the rent – provided Mrs Tate agrees to some sort of contract with me.’
‘I can guarantee that.’
After he was gone, off to join the celebrations at the Savoy, the young woman who had exiled herself to the next-door room reappeared in Richard Oliver’s office in a much more thoughtful mood than the one in which she had left it. Richard offered her a drink, which she accepted, lighting a Du Maurier with a small gold lighter while it was poured and sinking elegantly into the chair whose comforts Waldo had refused earlier.
‘Well, well, well,’ she said slowly, in a bad Cockney voice. ‘Well I never did.’
‘And what did you never do, Miss Gore-Stewart?’ Richard asked, handing her a glass of cognac.
‘He really did all that?’ Meggie wondered, now in her own voice. ‘Mr Waldo Astley arranged all this? He really did?’
‘Why should that surprise you? That’s the kind of chap he is.’
Meggie shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘I really had no idea.’
‘I don’t suppose you did.’ Richard laughed, sitting back down. ‘People are always getting Waldo wrong. They think he’s a black marketeer, or a playboy, or just some rich card-playing Lothario who’s got nothing better to do than gamble and speculate. That’s not Waldo Astley at all.’
‘How come you know him? Mind you – who doesn’t know Mr Waldo Astley nowadays.’
‘My father and his father did a lot of business. My old man bought a lot of paintings for Astley Senior, before the war. Not a nice man.’
‘But rich.’
‘Could say. But you must know Waldo as well as I, since he’s bought a house in good old Bexham?’
‘Our paths have hardly crossed,’ Meggie replied. ‘I only really know him through – well, through the Tates, actually. I’ve hardly exchanged more than a few words with him.’
‘Then you’re missing out, Meggie dear. Mr Waldo Astley is really quite a fellow.’
‘So it seems,’ Meggie agreed, looking thoughtful. ‘So it would seem.’
Before he left for Germany, Waldo made a discovery that was to have repercussions. He found a boat; or more correctly he discovered a boat. He was back in Bexham, preparing for his journey, when Rusty knocked on his study door asking him if he had a moment. Despite being behind with his travel arrangements, Waldo abandoned his affairs and followed her over to her family’s boatyard on the southern shore of the estuary where she showed him a small fourteen-footer that her father and brother Mickey had been busy preparing for sale.
‘It’s a very pretty craft, Rusty,’ Waldo agreed, trying not to look at his watch. ‘But it’s not really the kind of boat to which I can honestly say I am attracted. I’m an old-fashioned guy with tastes too grand for my wallet. If I’m going to buy something it will have to be an ocean-going lady with a bit of style.’
He let his gaze wander round the boatyard, penetrating the darker corners and the large greying cobwebs that hung almost like ropes at some points, taking in the half-organised chaos that surrounded him. It was then that he noticed a good-looking craft lying half on its side, in a bad state of disrepair.
‘That is rather the kind of thing I want, Rusty,’ he said, pointing it out. ‘Except in a seaworthy condition.’
‘Wouldn’t everyone,’ Rusty agreed, somewhat sadly. ‘She was the most lovely lady, the best there was, in my opinion. Tight, fast and … you know – had a whole lot to her you just can’t describe.’
‘The way boats do.’
‘You do know about boats then, Mr Astley? I thought you were a novice.’
‘I know nothing about boats. As they say, I just know what I like. To whom does it belong?’
‘The man who owned it’s dead. Killed in the war.’
Waldo frowned, and walked towards the ruined craft to take a better look at it. ‘The Light Heart’, he read. ‘Has to be some boat with a name like that. Who was the man who died? Was he what you call a Bexhamite, Rusty?’
‘I suppose so. He certainly grew up here, spent all his holidays here, and he sailed here all the time – so yes, I suppose so. His family had a house here as well. He was a terrific bloke – an absolute hero really. David Kinnersley. Everyone liked Mr Kinnersley.’ She fell silent, remembering Mr Kinnersley, how dashing he had been, fair-haired, handsome, always laughing. ‘He looked like something on the flicks, you know, like Errol Flynn or someone. In fact come to think of it he was just like something out of the flicks. Always setting off cross Channel in the worst weather to rescue people from the Nazis. They smuggled them through Denmark, you know, and he brought them back here to Bexham, and after that to London. Didn’t matter what, he always came back with as many as he could manage. Makes your heart turn over just to think of how many times he went backwards and forwards. Then of course there was Dunkirk – and when the call went out to rescue our army off the beaches, of course he was off in the Light Heart, hardly before the broadcast was even ended. That was Mr Kinnersley.’
Rusty stopped, of a sudden turning away from the sight of the Light Heart as if it was a dead body, not a boat.
‘That’s OK, Rusty,’ Waldo said, noting this. ‘You don’t have to tell me any more – not if you don’t want to.’
‘Thanks,’ Rusty replied. ‘I know I don’t. As a matter of fact, I’ve hardly ever spoken about this to anyone really. About the Light Heart and about – about Mr Kinnersley really. I had a bit of a crush on him, you see. More than a bit of a crush actually – I was daft about him. He didn’t treat me like a girl, he treated me like a proper first mate. And what with being left-handed and having red hair, you can imagine. I’d had a right time of it at school. But he wasn’t like that, Mr Kinnersley wasn’t. He was different – didn’t treat you as if you should have been a boy, or shouldn’t have had red hair. Or shouldn’t be left-handed. Saying there had to be something wrong with your brain if you were left-handed.’
‘Nothing wrong with your brain, young lad.’
‘No, there isn’t, is there?’ Rusty grinned at him. ‘Anyway – when the balloon went up about Dunkirk, off I went with him. I wasn’t going to do nothing, was I? I wasn’t going to sit at home knitting socks and doing what all the other girls and their mums were doing. I smuggled myself on board the Light Heart. It wasn’t much of a risk ’cos I knew once we was out to sea, I knew Mr Kinnersley would treat me like he always treated me, because, like I said, that was the kind of man he was. Not just a hero but a gentleman.’
‘And what happened?’ Waldo wondered out of the silence. ‘Or don’t you want to talk about it?’
‘Nope.’ Waldo shook his head.
‘He got killed, Mr Astley,’ Rusty said. ‘Got drowned on the second trip – trying to save my brother. Nothing anyone could do.’
Another silence ensued, during which Rusty tidied up some loose ropes that were hanging in a jumble from various fixings on the boat, keeping her face turned away from Waldo, who watched her sympathetically.
‘Fine,’ he said suddenly. ‘If you ask me there’s only one thing for it, Rusty, and that is to get this lovely boat shipshape again and back into commission. Least we can do in honour of its dead skipper. How do we go about finding out more about her, do you think? Technically who owns her now?’
Rusty shrugged her shoulders, winding rope round a rusting old cleat.
‘I don’t know,’ she said with a frown. ‘Mr Kinnersley could have left it to Meggie Gore-Stewart. I mean they were engaged at the time. I don’t know, to be quite honest.’
‘I didn’t know Meggie had been engaged.’
‘Mr Kinnersley and she’d known each other since they were kids. Meggie was sent down here for her health, and they learned how to sail together as kids – then when they grew up …’ Rusty turned away. ‘They got engaged,’ she muttered, finding yet more rope to untangle. ‘Someone told me they were going to tie the knot before the war but her family said no or something. Anyway – anyway they didn’t, and then Mr Kinnersley was killed at Dunkirk. If the Light Heart does belong to Meggie now, she might sell it because I do know she needs the money. According to Dad she’s even had to put her house up for sale.’
‘Cucklington?’ Waldo could hardly believe his ears. ‘But I understand that’s the family house. That it’s always been in the Gore-Stewart family—’
‘That’s as maybe, Mr Astley. But she’s got to sell it now. Something to do with her dead parents’ debts or something. I don’t know. I don’t understand these things.’
‘I see.’ Waldo examined the end of his cigar now, as if that might provide him with a solution. ‘In that case we shall have to think of something else, won’t we, Mrs Rusty Sykes? And as it so happens, I think I have just actually thought of it. But I’m going to need your discretion in the matter.’ He gave a small cough, and stuck the unlit cigar back in his mouth.
‘Discretion?’ Rusty wrinkled her nose at him in bewilderment. ‘How do you mean my discretion, Mr Astley?’
‘What I mean is – to put it quite impolitely – I’m going to need you to keep that mouth of yours well and truly shut.’
Rusty hesitated, looking suddenly thoughtful as Waldo glanced down at his watch, mindful of the fact that he hadn’t yet begun his packing.
‘You can do that for me, Rusty, can’t you?’
‘Course I can, Mr Astley. You know I can.’ She looked at Waldo directly in the eyes, her mouth set firmly. ‘You know you can trust me.’
‘I have no doubt about that, Rusty,’ he replied. ‘I never had.’
Judy received one last visit from Waldo before he left for Germany. Not that Judy was aware of his destination, only that he was going to be away on business for a few days.
But this time, instead of visiting her at Owl Cottage, he came to collect her in his Jaguar so that there was absolutely no chance at all that any of the curtain-twitchers down her lane could miss his call. Nor in fact that any Bexhamite could fail to spot them cruising round the village with the soft top down taking what looked like infinite pleasure in each other’s company.
‘You have yet to tell me whether or not this is having any effect,’ Waldo pointed out as he drove slowly round the streets of Bexham.
‘Whether what’s having any effect?’ Judy asked, nonplussed.
‘My role as Iago, of course.’
‘Oh. It’s hard to tell, really.’
‘I don’t see why. Either your husband is behaving differently to you or he’s not. Or – for instance – somebody might have said something to you?’ Waldo looked round at her. ‘Like that divine mother-in-law of yours. Has Loopy said anything to you about being careful whose company you keep, or anything like that?’
‘Loopy’s too wrapped up in her painting, particularly since the success of her exhibition. But anyway, even if anyone had said anything to Loopy, Loopy always makes a point of forgetting all about it, by-mistake-on-purpose. She’s neither a gossip nor a scold. But who knows? Maybe Walter has been told by someone about my being seen around with you because he keeps telephoning me during the week. Which is something he really never does. Then last week he brought me home the biggest bunch of flowers you’ve ever seen. Oh yes – then this week he rang up suddenly and said he’d decided to take me to dinner at the Savoy.’
‘And you say nothing’s different?’ Waldo laughed. ‘And are you going to go?’
Judy turned and stared at Waldo for a brief second, and then redirected her gaze out of the car window.
‘Of course.’
‘Not necessarily. It’s not necessarily of course. Is it?’
Judy gave a small sigh. Waldo had a way of putting his finger on everything and he was right as usual. When Walter had asked her, a part of her had wanted to say no – and she didn’t know why. A part of her didn’t want to go up to London on the train to meet Walter at the Savoy, and she knew now that the reason for her reluctance was sitting beside her in the driver’s seat. Compared to Waldo with all his electricity, his plans and daring, Walter now seemed faintly dull.
‘Yes, of course I want to go,’ she repeated. ‘Of course I do.’
Whereupon Waldo stopped the car without any warning, the way a parent might when a child in its care was misbehaving and had to be reprimanded.
‘Right, it’s home truth time,’ Waldo said, perturbing Judy who glanced at him anxiously. ‘You think you’ve fallen in love with me when you’ve done nothing of the sort.’
‘How dare you?’ Judy gasped. ‘How dare you?’ Outraged, and without any good reason as she was well aware, she turned bright red and immediately looked away.
‘Just listen, and don’t get on a high horse,’ Waldo said. ‘You think that making yourself believe that you’ve fallen in love will somehow help mollify the pain you feel about Walter’s apparent indifference to you, other than simply wanting to have a child by you. But if you stop to think, this might be the only way Walter has of telling you that he loves you. I don’t think we can know what Walter has been through. Maybe it was so terrifying that he can’t even begin to speak about it because it might start to haunt him all over again. The terrible thing is you were separated for all those years when you should have been growing together as a couple but instead you spent them growing apart from each other. Then he comes home and you both expect it to be as it was – but that’s impossible. War changes people, particularly people as sensitive as Walter. What you were going to have to do when Walter suddenly reappeared back in your life was to start again, but you didn’t. You both started where you thought you had left off, which was really somewhere where neither of you had ever been.’
Judy fell to a long and thoughtful silence. Two or three times she went to say something then thought better of it, remaining silent and wondering at everything Waldo had just told her. At last she took his hand and held it.
‘I should be angry, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Why? Because you think I’ve been leading you on?’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘There are all sorts of ways of arriving at the truth, Judy.’
‘I see that now. And thank you. I’ve been an idiot – only thinking of myself and not of Walter at all. This plan of yours to make Walter come to his senses by my appearing to flirt with you – it was just a smoke screen, wasn’t it? I’m the one you wanted to make see sense – yes?’
‘It’s a double-edged sword,’ Waldo replied. ‘Maybe Walter has to come to his senses, too. And maybe he will when the word gets about even more.’
‘About this?’
‘About you and me being seen together.’
Waldo smiled at her. Then, starting the car up again, he turned its nose up a lane to a beauty spot high on the hills that overlooked the estuary and the headland. As he drove he continued to talk.
‘You haven’t had it easy, you know, either of you,’ he said. ‘Let’s face it – a husband who comes back to you after such a long absence, totally changed by experiences not of his choosing, must seem like a stranger.’ Judy said nothing to contradict this, so Waldo continued. ‘So to get back to your proposed dinner date – meeting him for dinner, where there are no distractions, where you have to concentrate on him and him alone, maybe it’s what you need. It could be a turning point. He might start to be able to talk, to be able to tell you things that he hasn’t been able to tell you before. He might – although I pray to God he doesn’t – he might even want to confess something to you, something shocking or terrifying, but something that might help you to understand you both better. Tell me – how many times have you and Walter been out to dinner alone since he came back? I don’t mean dinner parties – I mean out to dinner.’
Judy thought for a moment. ‘Not once.’
‘I rest my case.’
Waldo pulled the Jaguar off the lane and on to a track that led towards the clifftops.
‘Why are you doing this, Waldo?’ Judy suddenly asked as he was parking the car. ‘Why are you taking such a proprietary interest in Walter and me?’
‘Because I like you very much – both of you. Because maybe I wish I was Walter. Maybe John even, or Peter Sykes or your father-in-law – I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind being any of you.’
‘Don’t you like being you?’
‘I don’t think I know who I am. That’s the whole problem. Just don’t know.’
Having reached the end of the track, Waldo pulled the car into the small clearing that served as a parking place. Swinging the low door open, he got quickly out of the Jaguar and stood at the top of the hill looking out over the view, with the stiff sea breeze ruffling his thick dark hair. After a moment, Judy opened the passenger door and went to stand beside him.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk.’
They walked along the clifftop path, the wind in their faces, and below them boats sailing on the white-capped blue sea.
‘Why did you come here, Waldo? Why did you come to Bexham?’ Judy asked after they had walked a good half-mile, and as she did so she wondered that she’d never thought to ask him before, so involved in her own muddled life had he become.
‘I had to, Judy,’ Waldo replied, still looking out to sea. ‘My father died last year when I was in Europe and I sailed back for his funeral. We were never close – in fact we didn’t get on at all, even though I was his only child, and that’s kind of odd, but there you are. He was a most unpleasant man by the time I got to know him, and by the time I’d got some polish and therefore could have been maybe a little more interesting to him, he went and died. It was very sudden. He was out riding his favourite horse, and he never came back. His horse did, but Pa didn’t. They found him up in the hills, dead from either a heart attack or a massive stroke.’
‘You’ve never mentioned your family before.’ Judy took a scarf out from her coat pocket and tied it in the wartime manner, knotting it on top of her head to keep out the wind.
‘For several reasons – the main one being I don’t really have a family. I had a father, but I never knew my mother. She gave birth to me, then left two days later.’ Waldo shrugged, sinking his hands deep in his pockets. ‘Possibly the problem was my father. He was a very hard and a somewhat bitter man – although why, God alone knows. He was absurdly rich and had everything most people want. Except the affection of others. He was, as I say, very rich and therefore very influential, but deeply, deeply unhappy. I don’t know what happened between him and my mother but all the time I was growing up she was never referred to, not once, by my father – and apart from me there was no visible trace of her ever having been in his life. He’d forbidden everyone in the household, everyone in his family, ever to mention her name, and my father being my father no-one questioned him. No-one disobeyed. It was the law.’
‘How on earth did you survive? More than that, how did you turn out so well?’
‘I don’t know about well – but thank you. As for how I survived, put that down to Bags. Bags – the greatest mammy in the world. Everything I am I owe to Bags. Bags was big – no, Bags was huge – she still is, God bless her. Bigger than ever. Bags is enormous, very black and very wonderful. She arrived the day my mother left because my father sacked everyone in the house who had worked for my mother, and he drove into town and came back with Bags, whose husband had worked for my father on his estate until he’d died in a lumber accident. Bags brought me up, loved me, took care of me, nursed me when I was sick, put up with me. Bags was my mother – and it was Bags who found out about my mother.’
Judy took Waldo’s arm, holding onto him tightly as they negotiated the now narrowing coastal path cut into the side of the hill before turning and retracing their tracks.
‘Did Bags know your mother?’
Waldo shook his head. ‘Like I said, by the time I was a teenager it was as if my mother had never existed. We lived a pretty peripatetic life – Carolina, New York, Monterey, Long Island, New England – and the more we moved about from one house to another the less connection there was with the past. The only link was Bags, and no – she’d never known my mother. She said that once in town, when she was young, she thought she’d caught sight of my mother in my father’s car – she had this vague picture of a beautiful blonde woman passing her by, waving at her and smiling, and that was that. Bags was only a kid then herself, you see. So my father and my mother must have been married for quite a few years before I was born, because Bags says she started work for my father, coincidentally, on the morning of her twentieth birthday and she thinks she was about fifteen when she saw my mother that once.’
‘So how did she find out about her? If she never knew her?’
Waldo stopped for a while to take in the view of the blue sea that ran out it seemed to endless horizons.
‘My father kept her on after he’d sent me to Europe, which was odd since he hardly visited Carolina once I was gone, and once war had broken out. When I went back to America for his funeral – we buried him down South – Bags grabbed hold of me – literally, before we’d even buried Pa – and gave me an envelope containing a couple of photographs of someone Bags thought could be my mother. They were scorched, as if they’d been pulled from a fire.’
‘Where on earth did Bags find them?’
‘In a bedroom – or to be rather more precise in a bed. She had been told by my father’s land agent to get rid of any old bedding and mattresses and replace them because he was going to do some pretty elaborate entertaining back home due to the fact he was planning on running for Governor, so he was intending to refurbish the family home which had fallen into disrepair. When Bags was turning over an old mattress on the bed in one of the dressing rooms off the main bedroom—’
‘I like one of the dressing rooms.’ Judy laughed. ‘Must be some house.’
‘It’s a typical South Carolina mansion. Anyway, out of the mattress, through a hole someone had made in the side of it obviously to hide things – out fell this little package. Soon as Bags saw the contents she hid them away until she could get them to me, most of all because of what was written on the back.’
‘And what was written on the back?’
‘Well might you ask, Mrs Tate,’ Waldo replied, looking down at the little fishing port that lay far below them. ‘On the back of one of them – a photograph of a handsome young man and a stunningly beautiful young woman – was written in pencil – as clear as the day they were written – the words Bexham 1917’.
Judy stared up at Waldo, but then something else caught her eye.
‘Heavens above!’ she exclaimed, looking over Waldo’s shoulder. ‘Here’s Walter.’
‘So what happened to you, Mr Know It All?’ Hugh wondered when he met Waldo at Northolt Aerodrome prior to Waldo’s departure for Germany.
‘Your son-in-law got hold of the wrong end of a stick.’ Waldo sighed, doing his best to keep his blackened eye wide open.
‘Knowing you I suspect that was rather what you wanted him to do.’
‘I could have just done with suspicions being raised, Captain Tate, not fists. Still, amazing what a good piece of black market beef will do.’
‘These should help you even more on your way,’ Hugh said, nodding to his aide who handed over to Waldo several large parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. ‘One thousand Lucky Strike, twenty-four pounds of coffee, twenty-four dozen eggs – so don’t go getting careless – and one thousand boxes of matches.’
‘Matches are in short supply now?’ Waldo exclaimed in surprise.
‘Sixty Deutschmarks a box. You should be able to buy a lot of information with that cargo – and here are the letters you have to post.’
Hugh gave him a large white envelope that Waldo immediately slipped into his official-looking despatch case.
‘Bon voyage,’ Hugh said, shaking him by the hand. ‘Come to dinner when you get back.’
‘You bet,’ Waldo said. Then he took his leave and climbed up the steps at the side of the waiting Dakota to get on board.
Hugh watched the plane taking off, and sighed.
‘Let’s hope all goes well,’ his companion volunteered brightly.
Hugh shook his head. ‘Yes.’ He turned to the young officer still standing at his side watching the now airborne aeroplane. ‘Yes, let’s hope,’ he agreed. ‘Since Berlin is his destination, that’s all we can do.’