The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  For a few seconds neither of the aunts said anything, but Bobbie thought that she would never ever forget the expression on the two women’s faces as they stared down at her. Or the amazement in Miranda’s and Teddy’s eyes as they turned from the dining room table and stared across the room at her as she came in, pale-faced and dressed in her vivid hues. It was as if they simply did not know her. The terrible silence as she sat down in her strange ringlets and bright clothes patently and obviously declared to everyone, even to the children, that Bobbie was ‘not one of them’.

  As soon as she was seated all the grown-ups who stood behind the children’s chairs, all the nannies and the mothers, started to talk at once, while the children looked at Miranda, the birthday girl, who sat at the top of the table staring at Bobbie, still at a loss for words. Only Teddy seemed not to notice and ran round the table and flung his arms around Bobbie’s neck.

  ‘I knew you’d come. Miranda said you couldn’t because you were ’vacuated somewhere else, but I knew you’d come.’

  It was not so for Miranda and Bobbie. Although it had only been a few months, there was now a yawning gap between the two girls. There had been enough deprivation, enough humiliation, enough change in Bobbie’s life to have reduced her from being Miranda’s pretend sister to being someone neither she nor Bobbie herself could recognize.

  ‘This is our dear Bobbie, who used to live with us, and now is able to join the party.’

  Aunt Sophie had murmured this, which was kind, because it meant that Bobbie could slip onto one of the spare chairs and pretend that she did not know that everyone was staring at her, as if she was a vision from hell. The old lace and old velvet of the other children’s clothes, their beautiful clean, shining, brushed hair, their perfectly kept looks, declared them to be rectory children, or manor house children, while Bobbie was, as she saw too clearly, and as Mr Dingwall now kept reminding her, one of us, now dear. Down at Rosebank you’re one of us, and that means you must muck in and be like us.

  ‘Hallo, Bobbie.’

  ‘Hallo. Happy birthday,’ Bobbie replied with difficulty as she crammed some bread from the pretty floral and gold patterned plate in front of her into her mouth, because there was no-one to stand behind her chair and put tiny pieces of home-made brown bread with plum jam onto her plate.

  Everyone else seemed to be waiting to play games, while Bobbie tasted Aunt Sophie’s bread, and remembered the wonder of her cakes, and the delicacy of her fruit jellies. Despite the misery of her appearance, and the eternal pain that the memory of much happier days had precipitated the moment she walked into the old rectory, Bobbie could not stop eating. Here again she showed herself to be different, grabbing at the plates in front of her and stuffing bread into her mouth long after the others had finished, so much that the mothers and nannies could only stare and look away, and then, as if unable to help themselves, stare again.

  ‘Do you like your new parents, Bobbie?’

  Bobbie stared suddenly across at Teddy, who had asked her the question. A lull had fallen in the room, and of a sudden Bobbie’s ‘new parents’ seemed to be of great interest to everyone, perhaps because of her strange, hungry manners.

  Bobbie nodded slowly, her mouth still full.

  ‘Do they give you jelly?’

  Bobbie nodded again, finally finishing what was in her mouth, and adding shortly afterwards, ‘And they have a toilet down the garden where there’s a tame mouse and I take him crumbs.’

  The other children’s expressions were a mixture of envy at Bobbie’s having a tame mouse and amazement that she had said ‘toilet’ at table, and in front of all the grown-ups.

  ‘I wish I had a tame mouse,’ said Teddy, and he quickly crammed the rest of his sandwich into his mouth.

  ‘If you come and visit you could see him.’

  That was all that Bobbie could find to say, because her whole concentration was on her plate, really. It was just so wonderful to taste Aunt Sophie’s cooking after all those winter weeks of Mrs Dingwall’s cabbage water and meat stew, often with caterpillars to be found in it, not to mention cardboard cake with hardly a twist of sugar and gone bright yellow from the dried egg wrongly mixed.

  ‘I think we will wait for Bobbie to finish, before we cut the cake,’ said Aunt Sophie, and she too stared in some amazement at what Bobbie had yet to consume. ‘She had a long walk here which has quite obviously made her hungry.’

  She did not mean to be funny at Bobbie’s expense, at least Bobbie did not think so, but even so everyone laughed. It was half the laughter of relief and half the laughter of mockery, but Bobbie did not care. If only they knew just how that food tasted after Mrs Dingwall’s cooking they would not laugh, not for anything. Besides, she knew she would feed off the memory of that tea for weeks to come. She knew just how she would lie in bed and dream about it, savour every little minute of it, so, laughter or no laughter, nothing was going to stop her eating.

  Not that she did not care about other things. She cared terribly looking at Miranda who kept staring at her as if they had only just met. She cared that Miranda was looking so pretty, wearing her usual strange mix of clothes, part velvet skirt, part lace-embroidered blouse, her hair caught up in a decorous ribbon and looped prettily at the back. But she was looking at Bobbie as if she was a stranger, and the fact was that she could not be blamed. Bobbie was a stranger to her. She could see that. And not just a stranger to Miranda. She was a stranger to Teddy too.

  She was not Bobbie their pretend sister any more, she was Mrs Dingwall’s pretend daughter. She had arrived for the party from Rosebank and it was quite obvious that Miranda and Teddy both wished that she had stayed at the Dingwalls’. That somehow or other, since she was so very unrecognizable to them now, they really rather wished, for her sake and for theirs, that she had not come to the rectory, looking so different, not like their pretend sister as they must have remembered her at all, not like the Bobbie they had once known.

  Happily, seconds later Miranda was called to help arrange the chairs for a party game and so Bobbie was able to go to the downstairs cloakroom and stay there for the next half-hour, her absence quite unnoticed. Eventually re-emerging she tried to join in the games, but everything overcame her, and what with her toes being chilblained, not to mention her acute embarrassment at her appearance, she ended up standing beside Aunt Prudence and helping to put on the gramophone records for Musical Chairs, while Aunt Sophie pretended to consult her about who she thought was the last to hit the floor during Musical Bumps.

  Of course, anxious as she was not to let Bobbie down, Mrs Dingwall had to be the first to collect her charge, coming through the front door of the old rectory with her hat pinned on firmly, her eyes determined, and then hanging about beside the grandfather clock as if she was waiting to be paid. Bobbie really did not mind. She was actually only too grateful to see her. She did not care what Mrs Dingwall looked like to either the other mothers or the uniformed nannies, or to Aunt Prudence and Aunt Sophie, or to Miranda or to Teddy. She just wanted to go home with her and never, ever, see anyone at the rectory ever again.

  She stopped by the front door as this thought came to her, and something inside her closed shut as she kissed the soft cheeks of Aunt Prudence and Aunt Sophie and then walked slowly and painfully after Mrs Dingwall on the long walk back to Rosebank, which was her home now.

  Having thankfully removed what Mrs Dingwall kept calling ‘yer party pumps’ and stuck her head under the outside water pump and allowed the cold water to pour over the hateful ringlets, she climbed the rickety ladder to her little boxroom with its cold water tank and its mice and occasional rat and gratefully closed her eyes on the day. No matter that Aunt Sophie had taken her aside and tried to reassure her that she and Aunt Prudence would ‘do’ something for her ‘soon’ – just as soon as they were able. To Bobbie, now, that part of her young life was over for ever. She would never ever go to the rectory again. She would never see Miranda or Teddy again. She would rather die.
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br />   She was different now, and she knew it.

  ‘She’s got some sort of chest infection,’ Dr Milton said, straightening up and looking round his immaculate surgery with its cream walls and its old sofa, part of his own house in Mellaston.

  How Mrs Dingwall had saved up enough money to go to the Eglantines’ doctor Bobbie would never know. But as spring beckoned, and the warmer weather was already on the way, out of tune with the season, Bobbie, having developed a cough, and lost not just weight but her appetite, had eventually been unable to go anywhere, and the panel doctor who would normally attend the Dingwalls would not come out to her, so Mrs Dingwall had decided to pay for the Eglantines’ doctor to come to Rosebank and see her little charge.

  It would have been a good plan only Dr Milton had no car, and no coupons, only his horse, as he had explained to Mrs Dingwall when she called on him, and showed him, by placing her money on his reception desk, that she actually had the money for a private call.

  ‘He’s just snotty,’ Albert Dingwall said, shouting so loud that Bobbie could hear. ‘He thinks we lives in a smelly slum so he don’t want to come out, money or no money.’

  And so, reluctantly, Dolly and Albert had taken Bobbie to Dr Milton, riding on Albert’s bicycle saddle because Bobbie had been too tired from the coughing, and too feverish, to do anything else but cling on to them, one arm round each, as the two of them had walked along to Dr Milton’s surgery, pushing Albert’s bicycle, and stopping every now and then for Bobbie to catch her breath.

  ‘How is her sputum, Mrs Dingwall?’

  Mrs Dingwall reddened alarmingly, and Dr Milton could see at once that the mere mention of such a thing was devastating to a woman like Mrs Dingwall who prided herself on at least knowing about the niceties of life, if not always being allowed to practise them.

  ‘She does cough a lot, I will say that, Dr Milton. It worries me terribly after losing our Marion to – after losing our Marion,’ she murmured, straightening her hat and staring at the floor. ‘And, same as her, she gets ever so hot. As I say, I brought her in to you straight away, soon as I realized that she weren’t the thing, because we lost our Marion this way, see? She was only ten, you know, when she was taken from us, but that was in London. Before we come down here.’

  Dr Milton washed his hands for a second time.

  ‘Roberta will have to go to the hospital in Bridgetown for a chest X-ray, Mrs Dingwall.’ Then, knowing that the poor woman’s finances must be already dreadfully stretched, he added kindly, ‘Don’t worry. I have a colleague who occasionally helps me out in cases like these, children with no immediate parents, and I know he will help you. There will be no charge.’

  Bobbie looked across at Mrs Dingwall. She had felt so ill during the past weeks that not even staying day after day in the freezing conditions at Rosebank had seemed to matter. She had known all the time, though, that she was very ill, because the Dingwalls would keep coming in and standing at the end of her bed and saying, ‘You look ’orrible, really you do.’

  And now as she saw Dr Milton stepping away from her, and Dolly Dingwall handed her yet another clean handkerchief to put to her mouth as she started to cough once more, it seemed to Bobbie that not even Dr Milton wanted to come too near her.

  Indeed over the next few hours it was all too evident that no-one wanted to go too near her. Even the Dingwalls were only too thankful to leave Bobbie in the charge of a Bridgetown hospital nurse, who in her turn was quick to shut Bobbie in a side ward, and leave her, coughing and alone, to her own devices.

  The chest X-ray confirmed what the grown-ups had all suspected. Bobbie had tuberculosis. She was to stay in isolation. She was not to return to the Dingwalls. She was not to return to Mellaston.

  ‘Where am I going to live now?’ she asked the nurse at the end of her first week in hospital, during which time she had learned to fear needles and nurses, and the sound of hurrying shoes, more than even being alone with Mr Eglantine.

  ‘I don’t know, dear,’ the nurse told her, backing out of the room. ‘A Mrs Eglantine called, but she could not visit, because of infection. They’re looking for some relative of yours to ask her what to do, I think. Don’t worry, they’ll find her soon, even if there is a war on. I am sure they will.’

  Bobbie frowned, staring up at the ceiling. She did not really have any relatives. Yet it seemed that there was someone who cared whether she lived or died, because she wrote to Bobbie.

  One of the nurses, having first carefully removed her mask, read Bobbie the letter out loud from a distance.

  ‘My dear, I am a friend of your poor dear mother. We both worked with Lady Reading before the war, so I expect you know of me. I hear you are not at all the thing. But soon will be doubtless. I am suggesting that you be placed at Hazel Hill, which is by the sea, where you will be looked after by a really special nurse. Failing that there is Scotland, the Highlands – the snow, you know. It can be beneficial, I understand, amazingly so for children like yourself suffering with poison on the lung. Do not worry, dear little Roberta. I will always follow your fortunes, if only from afar. This is because of the war, you know. It has made everything so tiresome, don’t you think? I sign myself your Fairy Godmother.’

  ‘Well, there we are, dear,’ said the nurse, once more behind her mask, her eyes sympathetic to the small child lying, white-faced but with a high spot of colour on either cheek, on the bed in front of her. ‘Everything is going to be all right after all. You’re to go to breathe good air that will make your chest better, and quite soon you will be quite better, you see if you’re not. You will be quite, quite better.’

  The nurse’s tones were so bright that not even Bobbie believed her, not that she cared. She only wanted to know one thing, and one thing alone.

  ‘This place where I’m going, it’s not school, is it?’

  ‘Oh no, you’ll never be going to school now, dear, I am afraid, at least not for a good long while, because of infection. But that doesn’t mean you can’t read books and learn things. No, it’s not school. It’s a special place for sick children. You’re a lucky little girl really, having this fairy godmother. Some children who come in here don’t have the chance to go to a sanatorium. So, you’re lucky, really you are.’

  All her life Bobbie would have a strange sensation, and sometimes at the oddest times. Sometimes she would shock people with it, and sometimes she would keep silent, yet all the time, whichever way she turned for distraction, she would be quite unable to avoid the truth of it. The first time she had it was when the Dingwalls came to see her off to Hazel Hill. She had to travel in a train, in a special carriage, and they stood on the station platform in Mellaston and waved to her. Bobbie could see Mrs Dingwall was crying, and waving her handkerchief, and that Mr Dingwall was jangling the change in his pocket and feeling embarrassed, because he kept looking away from his wife, and moving up and down the platform, and suddenly Bobbie felt that she would never ever see Mr Dingwall and his jangling change again.

  Even so Bobbie waved to them both from the train carriage window. Mrs Dingwall had presented her with a teddy bear wrapped in tissue paper. It was a beautiful bear, but it was the wrong colour, a sort of pink, a colour that somehow did not seem right for a teddy bear, but Bobbie knew that she would have to forgive the bear for his colour, just as she knew that the bear would have to forgive her for her constant coughing.

  Bobbie waved again, but the effort made her cough so that she was forced to press yet another handkerchief to her lips, unlike Mrs Dingwall, who was pressing hers to her eyes. The train started to move out of the station, and helped by the nurse who was accompanying her, Bobbie crawled back among the blankets that the hospital had sent with her for the journey. Seated in isolation, the rest of the train so crowded that people were staring resentfully into her carriage from the corridor, Bobbie clutched at her toy, and shut her eyes tightly. Miranda had used to call out, ‘Scrim your eyes tight, Bobbie,’ when they were out in the fields collecting wool and they came
across a dead rabbit, or some such, and now Bobbie scrimmed her eyes tight shut in the old way, and saw colours and whirls of strange patterns, like peacock feathers and stars all muddled up.

  But despite her tightly shut eyes, despite her efforts to avoid what she imagined to be the accusing eyes of the people in the corridor outside, and despite the nurse seated opposite her, Bobbie knew that she was quite alone now, and might easily die. She knew this as certainly as she knew that she would never see Mr Dingwall again, however much he had waved to her, however often Mrs Dingwall had said, in an effort to reassure her, ‘You’re going to a better place, dear, honest you are. It would be no good staying at Rosebank, not after this. We don’t want you going the same way as our Marion, really we don’t.’

  The train journey involved many changes, and much stopping and starting, before an exhausted young woman and her charge eventually reached Hazel Hill. As soon as she had seen Bobbie into the hall of the country house, the accompanying nurse thankfully waved her patient goodbye and hurried off to spend the night with a friend, leaving Bobbie seated on a hall chair and staring round at her new surroundings, wondering if this was where she was being sent to die.

  It was dark outside, and dark inside the house too, but Bobbie, although inwardly sick and fearful, and still clutching at her toy, could sense at once that this new place was somehow warm and calm. Once the muddle of women in front of her chair had un-muddled themselves, and she found herself staring up into a pair of friendly, humorous brown eyes, her grip on her toy imperceptibly loosened.

  ‘You are Roberta Murray, no?’

  Bobbie nodded.

  ‘I am Marie-Helene, but all ze patients ’ere they call me Marlene, like Marlene Dietrich, it is easier for them, you know? It is very stupid, but now you are going to ’ave to walk through disinfectant, and then you ’ave some gargling …’ the young nurse tossed back her head and made a gurgling sound to reassure Bobbie that it was not difficult. ‘And zen we will give you some supper, and you will ’ave a nice sleep, and in ze morning when you wake up, there will be nozzing to do but be ’appy and get better – no?’