The Wind Off the Sea Read online

  ‘That where you intend spending the night?’ Waldo wondered as he fell into step beside her.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘A matter of some concern, that’s all. I don’t particularly like the idea of you sleeping rough.’

  ‘Who said anything about me sleeping rough?’

  ‘This only leads down to the estuary – at high tide. Which is what it is now. At low tide – OK. You might be able to take a short cut to the quays and huddle in a hut somewhere for the night, but for the next couple of hours you’re not going any farther than the water’s edge.’

  ‘So what?’ Rusty muttered. ‘What’s it matter to you?’

  ‘I don’t like the thought of you stuck there at high tide. Anything wrong with that?’

  Rusty just shrugged by way of an answer.

  ‘Why don’t you go home?’ Waldo persisted. ‘If I don’t say anything – and I’ll make good and sure Mrs Morrison doesn’t say anything—’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Rusty interrupted, coming to a stop at the top of the shingled beach. Only a matter of a few yards below, large dark waves were breaking noisily on the shore. ‘The point is I can’t go home.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because – because I can’t. Because I’ve run away.’

  ‘You haven’t run very far, Rusty,’ Waldo observed with a smile, before turning up the collar of his coat to shelter a match for the cigar he began to light. ‘I mean if I was running away from home I’d have run a hell of a sight further before breaking in somewhere to try to bolster my exit funds.’

  He glanced over the end of his cigar at the small, diffident figure who was standing idly kicking stones.

  ‘Forgive me for my curiosity,’ Waldo continued. ‘But when a young lady is married she might leave home, or leave her husband – but she doesn’t really run away, surely, does she? Not unless – not unless something awful has befallen her.’

  Rusty said nothing. She just shrugged again and continued to kick at the pebbles.

  ‘Has something upset you, Rusty? Married folks have arguments, we all know that – and sometimes the arguments get a little heated—’

  ‘It’s nothing like that. I haven’t had no argument – and Peter – Peter would never get angry or anything. He’d certainly never raise a hand to me. Or anyone come to that.’

  ‘Yet you’re running away from home. So you say.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or maybe you’re just running away full stop. From something that has happened to you.’

  ‘Maybe I am.’

  ‘OK.’

  Waldo said nothing more. He just stood on the edge of the beach smoking his cigar and watching distant lights bounce off the dark waters of the estuary. Rusty said nothing for a while either. She simply continued slowly kicking pebbles, with her hands sunk deep in her pockets and her shoulders hunched.

  ‘If you really want to know,’ she said out of the blue, ‘I lost my baby.’

  ‘You poor kid,’ Waldo said. ‘That’s a terrible thing to happen to anyone. You poor kid.’

  Rusty stopped kicking the stones and took a sideways glance at the tall man beside her who was standing still looking out to sea as he spoke. She frowned, wondering when the inevitable question was going to be asked, when he would wonder how she lost it, and why. But the tall dark American said nothing more for the moment. He just shook his head sadly once and continued to smoke his cigar.

  ‘I’ve got another child, a little boy. Tam,’ Rusty volunteered after another long silence. ‘He’s a lovely little boy, and the – the baby I lost, it was a little girl.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘My mother would have preferred it if it had been a boy, but then it wasn’t, was it.’

  ‘I can never understand why so many women only want sons. If every baby born was a boy the world would very soon run out of women – but then maybe that’s how some women would prefer it.’

  There followed another long pause, broken only by the crashing of the waves and the pulling back of the shingle.

  ‘Who’s looking after Tam then?’ Waldo wondered, tapping the ash off the end of his cigar with one little finger. ‘That was the name, right? Tam?’

  Waldo had deliberately repeated the name with an added resonance, in the hope of agitating Rusty into a fuller explanation. Instead, all he got was silence.

  ‘Your mother, I guess,’ he continued. ‘And she must be a good pair of hands – or sure as anything you wouldn’t have been happy to leave your little boy with her. Had you any idea of where you might be headed?’

  ‘Mother’s taken Tam over,’ Rusty replied angrily, ignoring the second part of Waldo’s question. ‘Even if I’d wanted to bring him with me she wouldn’t have let me. Like the way she took Jeannie.’

  ‘Jeannie?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘But I thought you only had one—’

  ‘I said it doesn’t matter!’

  Rusty was looking at him fiercely now, breathing in and out deeply before turning on her heel and walking back up the path away from the sea. Waldo let her go ahead of him before ambling along after her.

  ‘I lost my sense!’ she called out loudly. ‘I just lost a bit of sense! That’s all that happened! Hardly surprising neither! I lost a bit of sense!’

  This time it was Waldo who chose not to reply at once, gambling on the fact that now she had somehow been touched on the quick, she might drop her guard and consequently be a little more forthcoming. He’d already concluded that the loss of a baby might make anyone unstable, be it only for a short space of time.

  ‘Not surprising at all.’ Waldo deliberately kept his voice low, so that Rusty might not hear exactly what he said. He saw the ruse had worked as Rusty stopped and turned back to him.

  ‘What did you say? I didn’t quite catch that.’

  ‘Nothing important.’

  ‘If you think it’s easy – if you think I’m just feeling sorry for myself—’

  ‘I didn’t say anything along those lines, I assure you.’

  ‘If you think leaving your little boy behind, and your husband – if you think losing a baby and leaving your little boy behind and thinking you don’t love your husband no more – if you think that’s easy—’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Waldo assured her, having now caught up with her. ‘I imagine what you’re going through must be perfect hell. That’s why I want to help you.’

  ‘You want to help me?’ Rusty stared at him with a deep, suspicious frown. ‘Why do you want to help me? How?’

  ‘I’m not altogether sure. In any way I can, I suppose. I don’t have anywhere of my own to live, otherwise I could offer you accommodation until—’

  ‘I wouldn’t take it.’ Rusty shook her head at him fiercely. ‘I wouldn’t take nothing from any stranger.’

  ‘You were quite prepared to take something from Mrs Morrison.’

  ‘I’d lost a bit of sense!’ Rusty yelled at him. ‘Don’t you understand! Don’t you understand I’m not exactly in my right sense!’

  ‘Then why don’t we take you home?’ Waldo suggested.

  ‘Home? Home’s the very last place I’m going, I can tell you!’

  ‘Tam’ll be missing you.’

  ‘Tam’ll be fast asleep!’

  ‘He’ll miss you when he wakes up and finds you’re not there.’

  Rusty looked at him silently for a moment, considering this. ‘He’s got his gran.’

  ‘Little boys prefer their mother. Believe me. I was a little boy once.’

  ‘I’m not going home,’ Rusty said finally, but not with quite as much certainty as before.

  ‘OK. I know – the vicarage. I’m sure the good vicar will be able to help.’

  ‘I don’t need no help from no vicar neither.’

  ‘OK. Just a thought.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They walked on up the lane, going nowhere in particular.

  ‘OK,’ Waldo concluded when th
ey reached the T junction at the top. ‘Right then. Long as you’re all right – and don’t need any more help from anyone, let alone me – this is where I say goodnight. And I hope you find somewhere warm and dry to rest your head. Cheerio, Rusty.’ He doffed his big black hat, smiled, and turned to his right to retrace his steps back to Gloria. In his head he gave her twenty but she was running up behind him before he had even counted to ten.

  ‘Wait! No – please, please wait! Please?’

  Waldo waited, but without turning.

  Rusty came all the way round him so they could be face to face.

  ‘I can’t go home,’ she said quietly. ‘They’d murder me.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t know my parents.’

  ‘And they don’t know me.’

  Rusty frowned up at him, unable to make sense out of this person who’d come into her life. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Do you trust me?’

  ‘I don’t even know you.’

  ‘Easier, then. To trust me.’

  ‘Forgive the intrusion,’ Waldo said as he took off his hat to stand in the cramped living room of the Todds’ house. ‘I know it’s awful late but I simply had to stop by and tell you personally how grateful I am to this young lady here. To your daughter, Mr Todd. Mrs Todd.’ He nodded to both of Rusty’s parents before turning to smile at Peter. ‘And I guess you must be Peter.’

  ‘We’ve been worried sick,’ Mrs Todd said, wiping her perfectly clean hands down on her apron. ‘We been worried sick wondering what become of her.’

  ‘I really should let Rusty here explain,’ Waldo said before Rusty could say a word. ‘But I guess her modesty would prevail and you wouldn’t hear the half of it. So if I may?’ He cleared his throat. ‘As of course you are all aware,’ Waldo went on refusing the offer by Peter of a flimsy-looking chair. ‘As you are all perfectly aware, young Rusty here has been suffering from an emotional upset. This is none of my business of course, but I mention it because Rusty mentioned it to me and because it explains her sudden disappearance this evening. But your loss was someone else’s gain, the way these things often turn out to be. My gain in fact. Because if it hadn’t been for young Rusty here, I would be a much poorer man and so too would my good friend Mrs Morrison, with whom you may well be acquainted.’

  ‘We know who Mrs Morrison is,’ Mr Todd nodded, taking his old pipe out of his coat pocket, only to have it immediately confiscated by his wife. ‘Lives in that fancy house up on the corner of the quays.’

  ‘I happen to be staying with Mrs Morrison—’

  ‘We know that and all,’ Mr Todd added.

  ‘And the both of us were attending the party that was held this evening at Miss Gore-Stewart’s.’

  ‘That right.’

  ‘It certainly is. Anyway, to continue—’

  ‘Please do,’ Mr Todd remarked, trying unsuccessfully to wrest his pipe back from Mrs Todd.

  ‘On our return to Mrs Morrison’s house,’ Waldo continued, ‘we were confronted by the sight of a youth wearing some sort of woollen helmet over his face—’

  ‘A balaclava,’ Peter offered helpfully. ‘They’re known as balaclavas.’

  ‘Thank you, Peter. Yes, we were confronted by this youth in a balaclava wool helmet running hell for leather out of Mrs Morrison’s house with his pockets bulging with what I imagine we would all call loot.’

  All eyes were on Waldo, and none more intently than Rusty’s.

  ‘He was gone down the lane before I could give proper chase,’ Waldo said. ‘But just as I was about to try to go after him, out of the lane just beyond the house appears this other figure, smaller than our fugitive but I dare say equally determined, except happily her determination unlike the fugitive’s was for the good. Rusty in other words. Your very brave and resolute daughter, Mr Todd, who went after that villainous youth like a terrier after a rabbit. And you know what? She caught him. She threw herself at his legs, wrapped her arms round them and brought him crashing to the ground – whereupon she jumped on him, pinned his arms to the ground and sat on his chest.’

  ‘That’s my Rusty,’ Peter said proudly. ‘Brave as a young lion.’

  ‘That’s Rusty all right,’ her father sighed. ‘She’s thrown her big brother across this room more times than I like to remember, a tomboy to the last.’

  ‘By the time I’d got to the thief he was still quite helpless, in spite of his struggles. We frogmarched him back to Mrs Morrison’s, emptied his full to brimming pockets, and – ah—’ Waldo hesitated as he realised he had arrived at a part of his story that he hadn’t prepared. If he said he had handed the youth over to the police, what with Bexham being such a small community his lie would soon become apparent. Even if he made out that he had handed him over to the police from the nearest big town, he guessed the Todds would be scouring every local newspaper report for news of their errant daughter’s heroism. Happily, it was Rusty’s turn to leap in and come to the rescue.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault about the window,’ Rusty put in.

  ‘You don’t reckon?’ Waldo said, with as much sangfroid as he could muster.

  ‘Mrs Morrison and the gentleman here locked the lad in the downstairs toilet while they called the police – and he got out through the window. Somehow.’

  ‘The one thing we didn’t think of was the window.’ Waldo nodded, hoping the Todds never visited Gloria Morrison’s and needed to use the facilities, when they would soon discover that in order to escape through the rest room window you would need to be either a child no older than two or three or a circus midget.

  ‘And the blighter was out of there in a flash,’ Rusty added. ‘Although he’d need to have been some sort of contortionist.’

  ‘But you got a good look at him,’ Peter said. ‘Good enough to recognise him again if you saw him.’

  ‘The other thing we failed to do, Peter,’ Waldo sighed, ‘was to remove his bacalava.’

  ‘Balaclava.’

  ‘His balaclava. Anyway – the good thing is Mrs Morrison and I recovered all our chattels – and the main thing was your daughter’s act of amazing heroism.’

  ‘Amazing’s the word for it,’ Mrs Todd said. ‘Seeing the state she’s been in.’

  ‘I think we’d all be surprised what a long walk on a bitterly cold night can do for the head,’ Waldo said gravely. ‘Followed by some quite unexpected adventure—’ He smiled at the assembled company and made as if to take his leave. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘The point is Rusty here did a brave and unselfish thing for two people she didn’t know. And although it’s no business of mine, other than to congratulate you both for having such a remarkable daughter – and you, sir, for having such a remarkable young wife, and to thank Rusty here for her heroism, I feel sure that whatever upset Rusty might have caused you by her sudden disappearance this evening, and whatever might have happened to have caused that disappearance, you can all of you put it behind you now and be very proud of this fine young lady here – who really has made this evening quite a night.’

  No-one said a thing, not even Rusty, tempted as she was to throw her arms around this stranger’s neck and smother his face with grateful kisses, which would not have been at all like her. All that happened was that Peter put his arm around Rusty’s shoulders and hugged her to him, shyly kissing the top of her head, while Mrs Todd reluctantly handed her husband back his faithful pipe.

  A minute later Waldo was striding back home to Gloria’s house, whistling ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.

  ‘Tell you what we have to do and do it pretty quick,’ Peter said to Rusty later, after he had brought her up a mug of hot cocoa to sip in the comfort of their bed. ‘First thing we have to do is find us somewhere to live. By ourselves. We can’t go on living like this. It isn’t right or fair, not on anyone.’

  ‘First we got to have something to live on,’ Rusty said, with a half-smile, sipping her cocoa.

  ‘We could try my wages,’ Peter rep
lied with a grin, sitting down slowly and carefully on the bed.

  ‘Mind my cocoa!’ Rusty warned, as the bed rocked despite his care.

  ‘I know I’m not bringing home enough, but perhaps if I had to—’ Peter stopped and looked at her.

  ‘Up to you,’ Rusty replied. ‘Whatever you want, I’ll go along with. Particularly if it means getting out of here.’

  ‘I got some ideas, Rusty. And as soon as we get some capital—’

  ‘Pete?’ Rusty interrupted. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You don’t have to apologise for nothing, Rusty. I’m the one who should be apologising for neglecting you.’

  ‘It’s going to get better now, Peter. I can feel it. Just as they say – things have to get worse to get better.’

  ‘I think you’re right, Rusty. I can feel it, too. And let’s face it, they can’t get much worse so they’ve got to get better.’

  Peter grinned at her and so infectious was the smile that Rusty laughed. They both laughed and it was the first time for as long as both of them could remember.

  Waldo knew this was only a beginning, but Waldo was a patient man so he bided his time. His favourite uncle’s business motto had been contained in three words – Don’t Be Previous. Although for a long time, as a young boy growing up, Waldo had always felt impressed by the axiom, he had absolutely no idea as to what it meant, until he finally plucked up the courage to ask.

  ‘It means, my boy, don’t be hasty and don’t rush at things,’ his Uncle Harry had told him, taking off his glasses and staring at Waldo. ‘It means always take time because time is all it takes. The longer people have to wait for your decision the more important it will seem. The very same goes for any offer you might be thinking of making. The longer you take to make it, the more of a bargain will it be considered, and the better for you the reward. Nobody ever won anything by being previous. But they sure have lost things, kid. Believe me.’

  So when Waldo finally drove his Buick up North Hill to refill its large petrol tank with as much fuel as he could obtain on the coupons he’d been given, he was able to congratulate himself for being well this side of previous. In point of fact he had allowed more than a fortnight to pass since the night he had caught Rusty Sykes stealing from Gloria.