The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  Here she could walk without stopping every few yards to feel sad or to wonder at some empty sight or forlorn and broken wall or garden building. Here too she could be free of Miss Moncrieff and her dispiriting ways, her little sighs and moans – but most of all her knitting.

  Living with Miss Moncrieff during the last rain-sodden fortnight, it appeared to Bobbie that the secretary was more than attached to knitting long brown stockings on very fine needles, she was positively dedicated to it. It seemed to Bobbie that part of the frustration of the poor lady’s life was that the stockings never seemed to lengthen, and anyway what was the point of long woolly stockings, now that spring and summer were on their way, and the very thought of them, let alone the sight of them, was surely enough to induce an itch?

  Of course Bobbie could hear the sea long before she could see it, as you always can, and so it was with a mounting sense of excitement that she kept walking, for this sea was very different from the one she had spent so many years facing from her sickroom at Hazel Hill.

  But if there had once been well-worn paths to the beach from the outer edges of the garden at Baileys Court, they were now far too overgrown to be discernible, so it had taken a great deal of determination, in the last days, to make a path for herself through to the pebble beach. Yet from these forays into the undergrowth, from these lone expeditions, had arisen her determination that with this new life had come a need for new clothes. Useless really to wear a prim coat and hat, cast-offs from her rich widowed guardian’s wardrobe sent to her from Paris, or New York, London or Rome. Bobbie knew that she needed wellington boots, and some sort of slacks, if she was to climb the fencing and barbed wire that lay strewn across the paths.

  In fact, despite having already clambered past any number of obstacles already, at least a half a dozen times that week, Bobbie still felt amazed that, although the war was over there was still barbed wire on the beach, giant rolls of it – and to the left, further away, she could see evidence of defunct landmines, their weird shapes now much decorated by coruscations of barnacles and seaweed, just as when she turned back and looked up to the edge of the small estate, concrete ‘pill boxes’ from which soldiers would have been trained to shoot the Nazi invaders still stood sentinel.

  She stared first at the grim evidence around her and then up to the now blue sky, at the seagulls that spread out their great wings and cried down to her, a lone figure on the grey-stoned beach, and it seemed to her that the birds overhead might be the souls of dead soldiers crying out for the waste of it all, and if she could have pulled at the barbed wire with her bare hands, or taken some dynamite and blown up the landmine or the concrete pill boxes, she would have done, but since she could not she picked up a pebble and sent it spinning across the suddenly mild surface of the sea.

  She knew that her guardian had sent her and Miss Moncrieff down to Baileys Court for want of anything else to do with them. Bobbie had at last been given a completely clean bill of health, and Miss Moncrieff, although she had been with Beatrice Harper for years, was clearly no longer quite the right type to go with her employer’s new and glittering image. For the post-war world had its stars, some of them still extant from the old world, others, like Beatrice, intent on rising to the height of the new social constellation.

  Also, as Mrs Harper had put it, ‘Now that I have purchased Baileys Court, we must keep a weather eye on it until such time as these stupid regulations have been waived, and we can get on with rebuilding.’

  This of course would have been sensible if there had been anything for them to keep an eye on. The truth was there was not. In post-war England the Ministry of Works would not, and indeed dare not, issue building permissions for places like Baileys Court without risking questions being asked in Parliament, and prosecutions of the most virulent kind were brought against anyone taking the law into their own hands and daring to build so much as a garden hut without a licence. In effect government rationing was not just on food and clothing, it was on everything, and while Beatrice Harper had snapped up Baileys Court for the proverbial song, restoring the former monastery to some kind of civilized state could take years, as Miss Moncrieff warned Bobbie daily, between the click of her four needles.

  ‘I fear we could both be here in the Sheds until well into our dotage, dear, really I do.’

  Much as she resisted Miss Moncrieff’s doom-laden statement, Bobbie knew that this could be only too true, and her guardian could well leave them both at Baileys Court for the next five years, if such was her mind. They could be there for what used to be known during the war as ‘the duration’ – in other words until not just the building permissions were through, but every brick and tile was restored. And the truth was that, if this was so, there would be little that either of them could do. Bobbie at just eighteen and penniless, could be left with Miss Moncrieff for years, and years, until both their hair was white, while the regulations on building materials were still in place. It was just a fact.

  But sickness and isolation had given Bobbie an attitude to life which at best could be described as courageous, and at worst, aggressive. Indeed, before Beatrice Harper had finally arrived in her life, Bobbie had long ago grown up. She had grown up in a way that children who are left by their parents to fend for themselves often do. She had appreciated that life was harsh, and that to survive she had to become determined. She was not like Miss Moncrieff. She would never show her real true inner feelings about anything, not to anyone, any more than she would grumble and moan as Miss Moncrieff did.

  But Bobbie knew nothing about gardens. She had admitted as much to Miss Moncrieff after the poor woman had cooked them one of her far too early and perfectly inedible lunches.

  ‘Do you know anything about gardens, Miss Moncrieff?’

  At this Miss Moncrieff had looked immediately tired – as if Bobbie had handed her a spade.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think we need do anything at all, not until Mrs Harper comes down, or sends to tell us what to do, really I don’t,’ she said, sounding suddenly weak. Then she had pulled her home-knitted cardigan with its three-ply cuffs and collars closer to her, and sat down.

  Bobbie walked back from the beach. Earlier she had found a bicycle, hidden at the back of what was once the stables, but was now bowed down beneath broken glass with saplings growing through it, the doors hanging to one side, sagging from rusty hinges that had long given up their onerous duty. By some miracle the brakes of the lady’s bicycle with its whitened straw basket and black chipped paint still worked, and so, having washed and polished it and pumped up its tyres, Bobbie set off, pushing it over the stony weed-ridden drive to the village.

  Baileys Court was set well away from the village which boasted one store, one pub, and one all-important garage. First there was the drive down which she had to make her way, pushing in a stop-start fashion in order to negotiate the potholes and clumps of rough grass. In this way she managed to reach the tiny road past the woods, which finally finished up at the main road which led to the village.

  At last Bobbie was able to bicycle, and the excitement she felt as she first wobbled and then straightened the bicycle and made it run in a straight line was intense. And there was a ridiculous and heightened sense of adventure in pushing the pedals down again and again, as round and round the wheels turned, and faster and faster she went, the still icy wind making tears of the water that ran from her eyes and down the side of her face.

  The feeling of sudden freedom was intoxicating, so intoxicating that when at last she braked and came to an inelegant and necessarily sudden stop outside the village pub, she felt as if she had circumnavigated the world, not just bicycled two miles. And no wonder, for as she carefully dismounted from her bicycle, it came to her that this was the first time she had been really alone, quite alone, in her whole life. Up until now, there had been nurses, and more nurses, and everyone either backing away from her, trying to pretend that they were not afraid of catching tuberculosis, or hovering around her. She had been a victim ei
ther of pity or of kindness, and both had been claustrophobic. Now, as she propped her bicycle up against the village shop window, after the past days of relentless rain, after the hours spent listening to Miss Moncrieff and sitting in stifling rooms filled with the smell of paraffin stoves, she felt as if she had been born again, but this time to a life that would be free of either pity or kindness. She had set off from somewhere to go somewhere, without being ordered to do so, and the feeling was out of this world.

  The sign hanging on the door of the village shop proclaimed it to be shut even for the sale of Bovril, and so it was that Bobbie found herself on a late spring day, outside the pub, the garage and the village shop of Baileys Green with nothing to do but lean against a wall and watch the world go by as the sun came and went uneasily overhead.

  She would have been quite resigned to sitting out the hour until two o’clock had she not been so thirsty after her bicycle ride. The sight of what seemed to be half the population of the village marching into the small inn prompted the thought – a thought which was enticing, insistent, and insidious – that she should follow their example, that she too should go in and have a drink.

  She knew the very idea of someone like herself going into a pub on her own would be perfectly shocking not just to her guardian, but to Miss Moncrieff. And yet she was so thirsty after her bicycle ride that she really thought she might not care too much. Not only that, but since being released from the sanatorium it seemed to Bobbie that she must never be afraid to do as she wanted again. She had seen death and faced him down after all, and now – well, walking into a pub was not about dying, it was all about living.

  The Dog and Duck was necessarily old-fashioned. So old-fashioned that, because it was a bright spring day, the darkness of the pub’s interior came as a shock to Bobbie as she pushed her way through the outer door. It was not just that the lighting, such as there was, was obviously dim, and of a very low wattage, but that the panelling, dating back perhaps two or three hundred years, was dark oak, as were the chairs and tables, and the faces of the working men and women, intent on relaxing for an hour before going back to their ploughs or their gardens.

  ‘Major Saxby – how do you do?’

  A gentleman on a bar stool, of military bearing, and a moustache of bright white that appeared even more so against a background of darkened cream walls and blackened wood, smiled at Bobbie and held out his hand.

  ‘Bobbie Murray – how do you do?’

  Bobbie smiled and, attempting a nonchalance she did not feel, asked the barman for ‘A beer, please.’

  The Major smiled and interrupted her. ‘Some beer, actually.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Some beer. You should always ask for “some” beer.’

  He proffered a silver cigarette case which sprang open at a touch, and when Bobbie refused his offer promptly lit one himself, breathing in and then out with impressive gratitude.

  ‘Thank God for a Craven A. What with no whisky, no cigarettes, no bread, and no blasted building permissions, England is worse off after the war than during it!’

  Bobbie nodded understandingly, while sitting decorously on her bar stool and contemplating the half-pint of pale beer in front of her. She had never drunk beer before and as she raised the glass to her lips she was really very glad she had not, because it tasted perfectly horrible. Still, realizing that Major Saxby – judging from how many incoming locals touched their caps or greeted him with a handshake – must be someone who knew everyone, she determined on drinking the wretched half a pint, even if it took her all day.

  ‘Bureaucracy!’ The word sizzled, span, and shot across the old wood of the bar. ‘Never has there been such a bad time in the whole history of England. Spivs abound! Spivs have become the heroes of the hour! Saint Crispin would be Saint Spiv in today’s world!’

  Bobbie looked impressed by this outburst. She liked people who fulminated. The French nurses at Hazel Hill had fulminated against everything. The Nazis, English food, English weather, the other nurses. Their black or brown eyes had been permanently fired up with indignation.

  ‘Life nowadays,’ the Major continued, ‘is nothing but pettyfogging bureaucrats, pen pushers who only saw the war from behind their desks, and profiteers whose bank balances are overflowing with black market skulduggery. One wonders daily what is the bloody point? What? One gets back, there one is, back at one’s cottage in Sussex, and one finds some jumped up idiot in civvies telling one that one can’t rebuild the leaking bloody roof! I mean to say! Oh, shut up, Gilbert. What’s the point? Just shut up.’

  He shook his head and his whole body moved with the effort of it, as if he was some sort of damp gun dog shaking itself.

  Since his tirade had come to a halt, at least for a few seconds, Bobbie said, ‘I am looking for someone to help me in the garden at Baileys Court. I can dig and pull at things, and burn, and that sort of thing, but I don’t know anything about gardens, not as such. You know, not as such.’

  ‘Do you know that the other day a greengrocer was prosecuted, yes, prosecuted for selling a couple of extra pounds of potatoes that would have gone mouldy anyway? I mean what is this country coming to, Miss Murray? What?’

  Bobbie shook her head, feeling suddenly miserable that the Major had not taken up her hint about needing help in the garden, but had thought fit merely to continue with his line of fire on the government.

  ‘A chap in this village – he was prosecuted for killing one of his sheep a day early. I mean to say, what? The Nazis have not been defeated, they are still alive and running the councils, and the government, I tell you, they are. They are! Shut up, Gilbert! I mean, what is the point?’

  ‘This garden …’ Bobbie began again, determinedly. ‘At Baileys Court. It is very difficult, because of the sea, apparently. Very difficult to grow anything by the sea, I read – almost impossible, it seems.’

  ‘Bureaucracy breeds dishonesty, it is just a fact!’ the Major went on, having paused to take a large gulp of his drink. ‘You keep making tangles of everything, making people fill in forms, keeping bread out of their children’s mouths, and what is the end result? They start thinking of ways round it! There were no bread queues during the war, for God’s sake! It is just a fact. And now there are twenty thousand deserters alone living without ration books, did you know that? Oh, shut up, Gilbert! What is the point?’

  Bobbie was just beginning to wish, and quite devoutly, that Gilbert really would shut up, and perhaps the Major too felt this because, of a sudden, there was a long, almost eerie silence.

  ‘Now about this garden …’ Gilbert Saxby smiled suddenly, and almost beatifically. ‘I knew Baileys Court before the war, you know? My parents knew the Duffs who used to own it – you know both their sons were – you know, ahem? At any rate they could not bear to live there any longer, so they sold it on. But of course they had bought it from old Lady Bailey. Now she, poor lady, lost her three sons in the first set-to. But of course, before that, the Baileys had lived there since Henry VIII’s time, and that was that, really. And so now you lot are there, are you? The Murrays, is it?’

  ‘No, no – no, it’s my guardian, Beatrice Harper, Mrs Harper, who has bought it, and we’re living there – that is her secretary and I. We are living in the Sheds, you know, the servants’ quarters? They have always been called the Sheds.’

  ‘The Sheds. Yes, I remember them. Well, well, well. Lead the way, Miss Murray. You have quite whetted my appetite to see it all again. What’s more, they have run out of beer and I have finished my lunchtime ration of one Craven A.’

  Round and round the great tangles of high-grown weeds, fallen trees, and crumbling walls they walked, peering under shot saplings that had formed into a hedge, and over hedges of wild brambles that had grown as high as trees. Here they saw the remains of the great orchid house, there the remains of a greenhouse.

  The Major grew more and more huffed and puffed, but also more silent, and Bobbie too, as the vastness of the wilderness ar
ound them seemed to grow larger and larger.

  ‘I expect you are completely put off?’

  They were back by the stone-porticoed entrance to Baileys Court now, and Bobbie was looking cast down. The Major lit another Craven A and shook his head, not seeming to be able to find the necessary words to express his feelings. Bobbie had learned to be silent. She had spent weeks and months on her own for hours at a time, so silence was not intimidating to her – rather the reverse.

  ‘No, I am not “put off”, as you call it. What the devil sort of person do you think I am?’ the Major demanded, frowning. ‘Of course I am not put off. Far from it. As a matter of fact this is just what one needs at this moment. Something to get me out of the Dog and Duck, and a great deal better than waiting for some wretched little man from the local Nazi Party, otherwise known as the council, to allow me to mend my leaking roof! After the worst winter of this century, we are not allowed to even mend our own roofs. I must tell you that this is just what I need. Heaving and chopping, clearing and burning, I shall pretend it’s them! Every time I chop something I shall pretend that it’s one of those little Hitlers on the council.’

  ‘You’re very fierce, aren’t you?’

  There was a short pause before Major Saxby burst out laughing. He laughed so hard and so long that for a minute Bobbie thought that she might be going to feel insulted, until she realized that the Major’s laughter was like other laughter that she had heard, from older patients at Hazel Hill. It was the laughter of someone who had not laughed enough; it was the laughter of relief; it was the laughter of someone who had laughed too little, and so long ago, that, like Bobbie and her bicycling, it had surprised him that he could still do it.