Bobbie’s intense gaze suddenly transferred itself away from the nurse. The journey had been so long. She had coughed most of the way, holding handkerchief after handkerchief in front of her mouth, but the nurse who had been charged with bringing her from Mellaston to Hazel Hill had seemed quite indifferent to her. More, she had seemed to be actually frightened of her – sitting far away and staring from her book to the countryside outside the window and then down at her book again, but never at Bobbie, as if the very sight, and most of all the sound, of the little girl was repulsive to her. And when she had spoken to her she had spoken as if Bobbie was quite different from the rest of humanity, as if, because she was sick, she actually needed to be addressed in a ‘special’ voice, the words slow and clearly enunciated, as if because she had a bad cough it was assumed that she could not hear either.
But now everything was different, and although Bobbie was exhausted, and the cough would keep coming, if only sporadically, as if it too was tired, suddenly there was this kind young woman with the dark eyes speaking to Bobbie in a normal way, not as if she was repulsive, but as if she was just a rather ill little girl. It was very nearly too much for her, but, because that door had closed within her, because she knew that she would probably never again go back to the rectory, or see the Dingwalls again, or Miranda, or Teddy, Bobbie was able, after only a few seconds, to look back into the young French nurse’s eyes, and, swallowing away the lump in her throat, walk slowly after her towards the room where the buckets of disinfectant lay waiting for her.
TWO YEARS LATER
Chapter Four
Miranda had always known that she enjoyed none of Bobbie’s finer feelings – why should she? Miranda was a survivor and she knew it. Of course she did have feelings, plenty of them, but because of the war and not knowing where she would be next she had long ago learned to suppress them – until, that is, she had seen Teddy bawling his eyes out in the evacuation centre. As soon as she saw the small blond-haired boy, tears dripping down his face, and no-one minding him, Miranda had known for the first time in her young life what it was to feel love for something or someone other than herself, and she had gone ahead and torn the label from his coat, and made him into her brother in a matter of minutes.
Here was someone as badly off as she was, and like herself quite alone, and so she had adopted him, in precisely the same way that she herself had been adopted and evacuated, and all the rest – arbitrarily, casually, and without consulting him.
She did not particularly think of any of this as Teddy stood on the station platform that afternoon because Miranda was not given to that sort of thing, but she did think of how much she would miss him, and wonder how he would be without her. Would he be all right?
Certainly Aunt Prudence and Aunt Sophie seemed to have adopted them both with as little trouble as Miranda had adopted Teddy at the evacuation centre all that time ago. And not only had they adopted the two children, privately, but in doing so they had also changed their surnames.
‘Very difficult for a boy to be called Darling at a boys’ private school, dearest,’ Aunt Prudence had told Miranda, very much sotto voce because she did not think that Teddy should hear about such things.
Miranda was not to be sent away to school. Girls were not sent away to school. Girls stayed at home and learned to sing and play the piano, and one day, Aunt Sophie told Miranda, she would be sent up to something called a music academy, and as a result would become famous, just as Aunt Sophie had wanted to become famous, until her father had put his foot down and she had been made to stay at home and help instead.
‘Take care of yourself, Teddy,’ Aunt Prudence told him, deliberately using a stern voice because a stern voice meant she was trying not to let the side down by being seen to be emotional.
‘Yes, dearest, take care of yourself. If you have any kind of troubles, you write to us at once, and we will come straight to Herefordshire, won’t we, Prudence?’
‘Straight to Herefordshire, even if it means Tom Kitten trotting all day and all night.’
The words were meant to be reassuring, but although they were concerned, anxious and loving they were most definitely not reassuring, least of all to Teddy.
Seeing this Miranda leaned forward and pecked him suddenly on the cheek.
‘Keep your pecker up, Ted,’ she whispered, in their old London way, and before the sound of the train steaming into Mellaston station could drown her words. ‘You know, keep your pecker up and don’t forget to write me a card, eh?’ Teddy nodded and gave his odd smile. He hated having to leave Mellaston, but the aunts wanted him to be a gentleman and become something important, Aunt Sophie had explained, and he could never be that if he stayed doing his reading and writing at the rectory.
Teddy stared ahead at the steam coming from the approaching train. He would probably be the only person on the train who was not a soldier. The WVS lady who was accompanying him to school nodded down at him at that moment as if to say, ‘Now is the time to say goodbye, Teddy Mowbray,’ and then, seconds later, the aunts were giving him a quick hug and he was on the train, with his trunk and his suitcase, and there was no time not to be brave, really, just time enough to look out of the window and see Miranda becoming smaller and smaller until the train rounded a corner and, of a sudden, she had vanished.
He sat back suddenly against the seat. Supposing he never saw her again? The train was hot and stifling, and full of soldiers and sailors. Teddy decided to try to count how many of each he could see, and before long, what with the heat and the sway of the train, and quite against his wishes, he had fallen asleep.
At last they arrived, after many changes, at yet another small country station. Climbing out after the WVS lady and standing on the platform with its blacked-out name Teddy had the feeling that he had come to a very pretty place. It was not that he could see much of it, but he could sense it, the way that children can sense the sea long before they reach it. Up until then he had thought that nowhere was prettier than Mellaston, but now he sensed that here was somewhere just as beautiful, and so, cheering up more than he would previously have thought possible, he picked up his suitcase, leaving his trunk to be collected later, and, following the tweed-coated lady in front of him, began the long walk to the school.
Taking it in turns to carry Teddy’s overnight suitcase, they came at last to an elaborate pair of gates marking what the lady seemed satisfied was the correct place for them to turn, and from there they again walked for some good way up a long drive, grassed over now because of the war, the lady explained, where before the war there would have been gardeners to weed it. They walked on until they reached a flight of stone steps at the top of which was a pair of large, recessed, half-glassed wooden doors.
‘Up we go,’ the lady whose name Teddy had not bothered to learn, and now would probably never know, urged him.
The door at the top was opened by another boy not much taller than Teddy himself, but older in that particular way that boys who are the first to arrive at schools always seem to be.
‘You’re Mowbray, are you? I’m Rawlings.’ He grinned. ‘We’re the first. We’ll be able to get the best beds in the dormitory.’
He helped Teddy with his suitcase while the WVS lady went in search of a master.
‘You’ll like it here,’ Rawlings told Teddy. ‘It’s smashing. You’ve no idea what we get up to when the masters aren’t looking, but you’ll soon find out.’
Teddy stopped, panting, at the top of the first great flight of wooden stairs and looked down. The lady who had brought him from Mellaston was hurrying across the marble-floored hall below him. He had not liked her particularly but now that she was going without bothering to say goodbye to him he would have given anything for her to have given him a quick hug, as the aunts and Miranda had done. It seemed to him that it was his fault that she was going without even a wave. They had hardly talked to each other.
‘’Bye,’ he called down to her, but his voice was drowned by more new arrivals,
by other people saying goodbye, by Rawlings calling from ahead of him, ‘Come on, Mowbray, come on or you’ll miss the bus!’
Teddy was lucky from then on. He was lucky in Rawlings who became his friend, and he was fearfully lucky because he was taller than all the other boys in his form. He rather looked up to Rawlings, and soon learned to sound like everyone else by imitating the way Rawlings talked. He also learned to play cricket and to swim, and to stand up for himself not just by being tall, but by being charming. He charmed the masters too – so much that no matter what escapade he fell into he would always get off scot free. Because of his charm, because of his quick wits, and because he was tall, most of the time he could look down on almost all the other boys in his class and drawl in his newly learned voice, ‘Go away, squit.’ He was also lucky, being tall, blond and handsome, since many of the men had been called away to fight, several of the ‘masters’ at the school were women. The boys still had to call them ‘masters’ and ‘sir’ but no matter, there they were, wondrous persons of the opposite sex, and some of them were even young and pretty, so that although in many ways school was not at all like being at the rectory with Miranda and the aunts, in other ways, what with so many adoring women around him, for Teddy it was just like being at the rectory.
Right from the start Rawlings took him home for many holidays, and so Teddy quickly grew out of the feeling that he must go home and see the aunts. Of course he wrote to them and to Miranda, at first, but because they wrote to him all the time he really did not feel an urgent need to write back to them so often. And there was so much for him to do at school, so much that he had to be good at, that the idea of sitting down to write a letter always seemed to come to him only when he went to bed at night.
He still adored Miranda, but when he did go home in the holidays he realized, time and again, that because she did not go to school, because she was all the time at the rectory being taught by the aunts, she really did not understand how things were at schools, and every time he tried to make her understand she skipped off to do other things, things that boys who went to school did not want to do, and probably would never want to do.
‘The aunts hate it when you don’t come home,’ she told him, once or twice over the next year, and so when Mr Longman called Teddy out of his classroom one sunny afternoon and told him that he had bad news for him, those were the only words Teddy could hear in his head: Miranda’s voice saying, The aunts hate it when you don’t come home for the hols.
‘There was a bombing raid in Sussex last night, and your guardians were both killed. They were staying at an hotel while visiting a sick little girl in Hazel Hill, and the hotel had a direct hit. No-one survived. I am sorry, Mowbray. You have only your sister now, I am afraid. But remember – that is after all something, to have a sister still.’
Teddy would always remember Miss Warninglid who accompanied him to the aunts’ funeral at Mellaston Cathedral, and how beautiful she looked in her black coat and skirt with her blond hair neatly tied underneath a hat that sat to one side over her eye. It was dreadfully shaming, he realized afterwards, but he was really more preoccupied by being quite alone with his adored Miss Warninglid than he was by his feelings of sorrow for Aunt Prudence and Aunt Sophie.
Later, when he was older and looked back on that journey, Teddy was ashamed that he had not thought more about the implications of what lay ahead, about how sad it was for Miranda, and for him, that their adopted aunts had been killed. But the sober truth was that, at the time, all he could do was stare at Miss Warninglid and think of how much he loved her. All his thoughts were less of the sorrow ahead than of the wonder of her pretty face, and the smell of her perfume. He could hardly bear the idea that Miss Warninglid was rumoured to be engaged to the headmaster, and much of the journey to Mellaston was taken up with the idea that if he made a passionate speech to Miss Warninglid before the train pulled into Mellaston station, she might postpone her engagement to the headmaster until Teddy was able to grow up and marry her himself.
‘Aunt Prudence and Aunt Sophie went to see Bobbie,’ Miranda told him at the funeral tea afterwards, ‘and the hotel was hit by a bomb. They didn’t have a chance. What will happen now, Teddy?’
Teddy stared at his sister. What would happen? He had not thought of what would happen. He had just thought that he would go to the funeral, feel very sad, and then go back to school again with Miss Warninglid.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know—’ Miranda tugged at his jacket sleeve, pulling him towards a corner of the old room, well away from the rest of the mourners. ‘Mrs Eglantine has taken charge of us now, the way she did when we first came here, because you know she’s always in charge of things like that.’
‘I hate Mrs Eglantine.’
‘I know, so do I, but what will happen, Teddy?’ Miranda lowered her voice to a dramatic whisper. ‘I mean someone’s going to find out we’re not really bro and sis and then they might put us in prison!’
‘Course we’re brother and sister. They adopted us, didn’t they? I mean we’re Mowbrays now. Mrs Eglantine can’t do anything about that, can she?’
‘I dunno.’
‘We look like each other, don’t we? I mean people always said so, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, but I heard the dean saying that the house is to be sold, and we’re to be something called “wards” or something, until we’re older, and grown up, and that you’re to stay at school, I mean the whole time, and I’m to go to a friend of the aunts in Norfolk. It’s all arranged. Where’s Norfolk, Teddy?’
Teddy frowned, and then eventually, with a vague gesture of one hand as if he was actually holding a map with the other, he said, ‘Up there somewhere. It’s on the sea. You’ll like being on the sea.’
‘You will write, won’t you, Teddy?’
Teddy frowned and blinked, suddenly realizing that he actually loved Miranda even more than Miss Warninglid.
‘Of course I’ll write.’
‘I’ll send you the address. I’ll send it to your school.’
‘What about Bobbie? We must see her, mustn’t we?’
‘Bobbie’s going to die, Teddy. I heard Mrs Eglantine saying that the aunts had gone to see her because she was “not expected to live”.’
Teddy frowned, staring at the floor. It seemed that everyone they knew was going to die pretty soon. He looked up again and stared across at Miss Warninglid. He would not let Miss Warninglid die – he would kill anyone who tried to make her die.
‘Shall we have to go to Bobbie’s funeral soon, Miranda?’
‘I don’t know. I expect so. She’s so ill she has had to be put in a special place, and there’s no point in writing to her, because she can’t write back. That is why the aunts went to see her.’
Miss Warninglid detached herself from one of the groups of mourners and came across to Teddy. ‘We must leave and try to get back to school now, Teddy.’
‘He’s going to be staying at school, now, isn’t he? Because of the house being sold and us being wards, he’s going to be staying at school all the time?’
‘Some boys do, and sometimes they go home with other boys, for holidays. It all depends,’ Miss Warninglid said, looking pretty and kind, and yet somehow, because of that, less reassuring than if she was plain and cross.
‘I want to go to school too, but they say I must go to Norfolk.’
‘I say, do let’s introduce ourselves. I’m Miss Warninglid, and you must be Teddy’s sister, Miranda.’ Miss Warninglid smiled her pretty smile at Miranda but Miranda, being a girl, was stubbornly unimpressed.
‘Why can’t I go to school with Teddy?’ she demanded. ‘I want to go to school with my brother.’
‘Perhaps you will. We must see. In the meantime, Teddy and I have to catch a train, don’t we, Teddy?’
‘I want to go to school with Teddy!’
‘I said we will see, really we will. I will discuss it with Mr Bratby, Teddy’s headmaster, when I return. He might we
ll consider making you an exception, Miranda,’ Miss Warninglid repeated in a calming voice.
Not believing the teacher Miranda ran from the room leaving Teddy staring miserably after her. The whole day had been really horrible. Seeing the aunts put in the ground of the churchyard and people crying, and then walking back to the rectory for tea, still expecting somehow to see Aunt Prudence and Aunt Sophie waiting for him, not really believing that they were back in the churchyard with the rest of the dead people, had all been too much for him. Of a sudden he burst into uncontrollable tears. Seeing his grief Miss Warninglid leaned down and put her pretty young arms around him in an effort to comfort him, but even that delight was not as Teddy had dreamed it might be, because her suit jacket was rough against his cheek, and her brooch scratched his ear, and when she straightened up and he had blown his nose, Miranda, his sister, was still gone. Through the drawing room window he could see her up the fields and far away from the house where they had once all played, he and Miranda and Bobbie – who was also going to die, like Aunt Sophie and Aunt Prudence. Suddenly his whole world was a sea of despair, and he no longer even wanted to marry Miss Warninglid, only to run after Miranda and for everything to be as it had been before.
‘Now, Miranda, you’re a very lucky little girl. One day, my dear, you will be a very rich little girl, but at the moment you are just a very lucky little girl, and I will tell you why.’
Mrs Eglantine put her heavily ringed hands either side of Miranda’s neck and pressed down on her shoulders, so that reluctant though Miranda was to sit down on the hated woman’s sofa she was forced to do so, simply and solely because not to do so would mean struggling, or kicking Mrs Eglantine on the shin, or something.
‘You are a very lucky little girl, Miranda, because the Honourable Mrs Sulgrave, who has always taken such an interest in helping evacuees, is a friend of …’ She paused. ‘Was a friend of Miss Prudence and Miss Sophie, and as a consequence, hearing of your plight, and that of your brother, although she was not able to attend the funeral, she has asked for you.’
The Blue Note Page 7
