The Wind Off the Sea Page 6

  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 dou
ble on that last bid of Five Diamonds …’

  ‘Pure chance.’

  ‘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.