The Wind Off the Sea Page 28

  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 stic
king 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, beca
use, 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?’

  ‘I thought maybe you knew.’

  ‘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.’