The Moon At Midnight Read online

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  CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS

  LUCINDA

  CORONET AMONG THE GRASS

  THE BUSINESS

  IN SUNSHINE OR IN SHADOW

  STARDUST

  NANNY

  CHANGE OF HEART

  GRAND AFFAIR

  LOVE SONG

  THE KISSING GARDEN

  THE BLUE NOTE

  SUMMERTIME

  DISTANT MUSIC

  THE MAGIC HOUR

  FRIDAY'S GIRL

  OUT OF THE BLUE

  IN DISTANT FIELDS

  THE WHITE MARRIAGE

  GOODNIGHT SWEETHEART

  THE ENCHANTED

  THE LAND OF SUMMER

  THE DAISY CLUB

  The Belgravia series

  BELGRAVIA

  COUNTRY LIFE

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  BY INVITATION

  The Nightingale series

  TO HEAR A NIGHTINGALE

  THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS

  The Debutantes series

  DEBUTANTES

  THE SEASON

  The Eden series

  DAUGHTERS OF EDEN

  THE HOUSE OF FLOWERS

  The Bexham trilogy

  THE CHESTNUT TREE

  THE WIND OFF THE SEA

  THE MOON AT MIDNIGHT

  Novels with Terence Brady

  VICTORIA

  VICTORIA AND COMPANY

  ROSE'S STORY

  YES HONESTLY

  Television Drama Series with Terence Brady

  TAKE THREE GIRLS

  UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

  THOMAS AND SARAH

  NANNY

  FOREVER GREEN

  Television Comedy Series with Terence Brady

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  PIG IN THE MIDDLE

  OH MADELINE! (USA)

  FATHER MATTHEW'S DAUGHTER

  Television Plays with Terence Brady

  MAKING THE PLAY

  SUCH A SMALL WORLD

  ONE OF THE FAMILY

  Films with Terence Brady

  LOVE WITH A PERFECT STRANGER

  MAGIC MOMENT

  Stage Plays with Terence Brady

  I WISH I WISH

  THE SHELL SEEKERS

  (adaptation from the novel by Rosamunde Pilcher)

  BELOW STAIRS

  For more information on Charlotte Bingham and her books,

  see her website at www.charlottebingham.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Charlotte Bingham

  Title page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Bexham, England, October 1962

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  1967

  Interlude

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Published 2003 by Doubleday

  a division of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Charlotte Bingham 2003

  The right of Charlotte Bingham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0385 602863

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

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  ‘We met on VJ night, supposedly celebrating victory. The cloud over Hiroshima cast turbid reflections in the beer. We have lived in that shadow ever since.’

  John Heath-Stubbs

  THE MOON AT

  MIDNIGHT

  Charlotte Bingham

  Prologue

  The time is twelve o’clock of a summer night, a time that is always particular, but add to it a dark sea, boats bobbing gently, the sleeping village of Bexham, and you will see that the midnight hour is not just a time for wolves to howl, witches to start to mutter incantations, or lovers to be revealed, but a time when everything can be seen clothed in a suddenly magical light. A time when familiar houses, the village green, the church, the old inn, take on a shining bridal look, when cottage doors open and figures slip out into the now brilliant scene, meeting under the trees on the green, or on the rolling Downs, or beside the water, for when a full moon is shining at midnight, madness is most definitely abroad.

  BEXHAM, ENGLAND, OCTOBER 1962

  Chapter One

  The moon was so bright that, when a dark cloud started to pass slowly over it, inevitably it seemed to be bringing with it a sense of doom. As the cloud obliterated the brilliant light the whole village appeared to be sliding silently not into night, but into everlasting darkness. First the houses set about the village green, next the old Saxon church, then the pub on the quays, finally the boats bobbing gently on the water, so that in the end it seemed to those few who were watching it that not just Bexham but the whole world might soon, with the moon, be about to disappear.

  At Shelborne, the Tates’ house overlooking the estuary, Hugh was playing the piano to his wife, as he did every evening. Loopy knew that she should be finding the music soothing, but this evening it was having quite the opposite effect. She lit a cigarette and stared out of the window down the garden towards the village harbour where they still kept a boat moored. She would have liked to put the television on and watch the latest news bulletin, but the fact that Hugh was playing for her made this impossible. She thought of her grandchildren and hoped that they were not wide awake and worried. She tapped her cigarette nervously, and too often, on the side of the ashtray and sipped her dry martini too fast, and at the same time hated herself for doing both. She should have more control over her nerves – she had lived through the last war, after all.

  The truth was, however, that whatever Loopy had lived through, and however toughened she’d imagined herself to have become, the fact was that for the past few days each hour had appeared to be not moving forward normally, but melting one into the other.

  It seemed that Hugh had at last finished his piece because he was looking round at her from hi
s piano. Failing her saying anything about his playing, he stood up.

  ‘Another martini, darling?’

  Loopy nodded. Another martini might, after all, help the time to go quicker, or was it slower that she wanted it to go?

  Waiting to go on stage that night Max Eastcott suffered a sudden attack of such severe stage fright that he found himself running headlong through the Green Room into the arms of the tall, dapper, dinner-jacketed company manager.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick, Henry,’ Max muttered.

  ‘About turn,’ Henry Robinson told him, imperturbable as ever. ‘If we played through the Blitz we can play through this.’

  ‘I really don’t think I can go on, not tonight, really I don’t.’

  Henry held Max’s arm and nodded towards the stage manager.

  ‘When you’re ready, Johnny,’ he called to him. ‘Cue the band.’

  The cue lights flicked on and the quintet in the pit struck up. Henry firmly propelled Max back to the brightly lit stage in front of him, on which the curtain was now rising.

  ‘We are dying the death out there, Henry!’ Max hissed, before drawing a deep breath. ‘No one out there feels like laughing, and you can’t blame them, besides which my stepfather’s brother and his wife are out front tonight,’ he added, inconsequently.

  ‘You’re doing a first class job, Max, all of you are doing a first class job. Remember what we say—’

  ‘The show must go on,’ Maisie Stirling sighed, as she appeared at Max’s side, rubbing her perfect white teeth with the end of one moistened finger to make sure they were lipstick free. ‘There’s no business like it, remember?’

  ‘Stand by—’ Henry warned.

  ‘We’re going up,’ Johnny called.

  ‘Hope to God not, dear!’ Maisie moaned, and she adjusted her costume and tossed back her hair.

  ‘And cue—’

  Henry tapped them on their backs.

  Max and Maisie stepped on stage to join their two colleagues who were entering stage right opposite them in the opening number of Act Two of the hit musical revue I Say Look Here. Normally the satirical number ‘Just Four Minutes’ had the audience in stitches, but, understandably perhaps, not tonight.

  ‘Give me a matinée on a wet Wednesday in Wilmslow any day,’ the tall and mournful Joe Martino sighed as he traipsed up the stone steps to his dressing room at the end of the number. Max, who had the quicker change, pushed past him.

  ‘You can’t blame them, Joe,’ he said as he went.

  ‘Ours not to reason why, ours but to act and die!’ Joe called after Max’s fast disappearing figure.

  ‘I can’t imagine how anyone could find that funny,’ Walter Tate hissed at his wife from behind his programme.

  ‘It’s not exactly an ideal time to be in comedy,’ Judy whispered, realising at once from Walter’s frowning expression that he was obviously determined to be stuffy about Max’s show.

  ‘Don’t know how Max has the nerve—’

  ‘Please – Walter.’ Judy waved her programme like a fan in front of her face, concentrating on the show.

  On stage the fourth member of the cast of five was bemoaning all the obscenity on television, pointing out that if that was what he wanted he could get it from the Bible.

  Judy gently nudged Walter.

  ‘You must admit that’s funny.’ But Walter only shook his head mournfully, as if saying he had quite given up on his elder brother’s stepson.

  He sat silent for the rest of the show, and when they went backstage to see Max, even though he shook his sister-in-law’s son by the hand, and patted him in an avuncular way on the shoulder, he left all the complimenting to Judy who, besides being very good at that type of thing, managed to sound passably sincere. As for Walter, he couldn’t wait to drive down to Bexham and put the whole experience behind him. Satirical revues were quite simply not his kind of thing.

  Later, as he parked the car in the new garage further up the lane, Judy put her key in the lock of Owl Cottage, pushed the door open and bent down to greet their two West Highland terriers before snicking back the lock and leaving the door ajar for Walter, following which she went straight to the kitchen to make them both a cup of tea.

  There was no doubt about it, London had been a shock, and not just because darling Walter had been so stuffy about poor young Max’s show. It had been the strange, uncertain atmosphere of unreality, reminding her of the days just before the war. As they’d driven out of the city she’d found herself looking for some sign of activity, her eyes constantly searching for the reassuring sight of couples passing by laughing and talking, or walking their dogs slowly through the leaf-strewn parks, in the time-old way. Inside the car they’d hardly exchanged a word, listening for news bulletins on the radio, Judy staring mutely out of the window as they drove past ribbon developments, new petrol stations neon lit, vast advertisement hoardings, all the time wondering, silently, if they would still be there in the morning. Thankfully, and at last, the countryside started to appear, and they came to Owl Cottage and Bexham, and the feelings passed as they always seemed to when they reached home, as if war and bombs were more to do with cities, which of course they weren’t.

  Now Judy pushed open the double doors to the garden. The star-scattered night sky was as clear as it had ever been, and the moon so bright that it lit up each part of the cottage garden’s neatly tended beds. As the dogs busied themselves among the shrubs, she stared up at the beauty of the heavens above her and wondered at their loveliness, at the galaxies and the stars, searching as for some kind of comfort in the mystic shapes of Orion, the Great Bear and the Little Bear.

  ‘A bomber’s moon tonight, I see.’

  Walter stepped into the garden and he too stared up at the night sky. As he did so, Judy turned and smiled. So many of Walter’s expressions were hangovers from the last war. A bomber’s moon had always been thought to bring good luck for the RAF because it meant it was easier to carry out precision bombing.

  She pulled her tweed coat with its fur collar and cuffs tighter round her, thinking of their children, Kim and Hubert, fast asleep at their schools. At least she hoped they were fast asleep, or, in Kim’s case, just looking forward to half term which was coming up, not dwelling on the crisis.

  ‘Has it all come to this?’ she asked Walter suddenly, as he wandered round the garden, staring at the last of the autumn flowers. ‘Someone being able to pick up a telephone and start a nuclear war, just like that?’

  ‘Kennedy’s got to stand up to Khrushchev the way Churchill stood up to Hitler – America’s got to stand up to Russia, or it will truly be the end.’ Walter was still staring up at the sky, his arm round her.

  ‘But it’s so different now – nuclear weapons, the end of everything.’

  ‘Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valour our only shield.’

  This was Walter’s favourite Churchillian quotation, and for some reason it always made Judy want to block her ears and sing loudly so as not to hear it, probably because it seemed so doom-laden. Instead she fell silent, continuing to stare up at the sky, wondering to herself, as she so often did, whether, if men had been made to go through childbirth, they wouldn’t have put their talents to better use than building atom bombs to end the world.

  Walter turned to face her, and as if from nowhere, his indignation obviously having built up on the drive home, it now burst out of him.

  ‘You see, Judy, my point is this, it’s that—’ He paused, breathing out, and in, and then, seeing Judy’s startled look, began again more calmly. ‘My point is, if this lot – if young men like Max Eastcott had fought in the last war they could not possibly put those sketches on stage and expect people like us to laugh at them. They couldn’t, really, they couldn’t. I mean. Tonight, they were making fun of the war, of everything we fought for, our friends died for. It’s just not on, really it’s not.’

  ‘No, I know what you mean. But. But I
thought Max was jolly good, Walter. Actually, I thought it was all really jolly good. Max did say it was war films they were poking fun at, and really when you see some of them nowadays, they are a bit – well, a bit silly, not real at all. No one laughs and jokes in them in the way we used to, no one gets on with it, and I just can’t believe in Noel Coward as an admiral, or whatever he was meant to be, whatever anyone says. So, I’m with Max on that, really I am, Walter.’

  Judy was determined to defend Max, if only because she and her friend Rusty Sykes had helped to bring him into the world during a bombing raid on Bexham. And anyway, not only was Max’s mother, Mattie, Walter’s sister-in-law, but she was also one of Judy’s oldest friends. In light of all that it would be ridiculous to be stuffy about Max’s show.

  ‘Mmm. Well, maybe you’re right, if war films is all they were getting at, that’s different.’

  As Judy looked round for one of the dogs, Walter stared up once more at the night sky, frowning, only to begin again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Judy, but I found the whole thing utterly facetious, and what’s more even if it was only war films they were poking fun at, it was damned unpatriotic. If it hadn’t been for Max up there being – well, Max; if he wasn’t Mattie’s boy, my sister-in-law’s boy, frankly, I’d have walked out. It was insulting to England, to the war, to everything we stood for, and heaven only knows what the rest of Bexham will make of it. Frankly, it doesn’t bear thinking of.’

  Flavia Sykes stared at herself in the mirror. She had just put on a stiff nylon petticoat with a layered net underskirt, teamed with a tight-fitting brand new Shetland wool twinset, the property, alas, of her mother. She twirled in front of the mirror before sinking gracefully down in front of it, all the time watching herself in the looking glass, mesmerised by her own beauty. After a few seconds of contemplation, and perhaps for want of knowing what else to do, she put her arms above her head and executed a few swaying movements. She had always been good at ballet, the proud possessor of long and slender arms, so now she watched in fascination as she moved them correctly in swan-like gestures before leaning forward and slowly kissing her own image.